Tag Archives: Craig Braack

Come Hear About the Erie Canal

Imagine you’re digging a moat 363 miles long. Using only shovels, picks, and wheelbarrows. Throw in some mules and oxen, and a few horses to help you out. And you might as well take some black powder, too, for when you hit rock ledges.

*Then imagine that your moat is actually a canal, so you’ve also got to create locks along the way.

*And while you’re at it, imagine that many of your workers are illiterate, and there’s not a single trained engineer on the job.

*What you’re imagining is the Erie Canal.

*Despite all that angst about taxes on tea, one of the reasons Americans rebelled in 1776 is because the British wouldn’t let them move west of the Appalachians to kill and rob the Indians. This was no problem once we got independence, but the mountain range was still a major obstacle.

*The Appalachians look low, even inconsequential, to us. But that’s because we aren’t trying to convince an ox to scale the slopes while hauling our furniture.

*Rather than using the overland route, people in Pittsburgh found it cheaper to ship their goods to Philadelphia by sending them down the Ohio, down the Missisippi to New Orleans, then out to sea and way south around Florida, then back up the coast to Delaware Bay and the City of Brotherly Love.

*Many people had seen the value of an Albany to Buffalo canal. New York Governor DeWitt Clinton hammered proposals through the legislature by which the state would fund the biggest construction project going on anywhere in the world. It’s staggering that they finished the job in only eight years (1817-1825).

*Its success sparked a nationwide canal-building craze, as communities hoped to cash in. But they overlooked a couple of key truths.

*First, Lake Erie and the Hudson River fairly screamed out to be linked. Just having a canal was meaningless. It had to join two points that NEEDED to be connected.

*Second, the Erie route might have been created for the purpose of one day putting a canal through. NYSDOT calls it “the Natural Corridor.” Besides the Canal, that stretch also accomodates (or accomodated) Indian trails; Routes 5 and 20; the New York State Thruway; Amtrack; the New York Central Railroad; and the New York State Barge Canal.

*While the Erie Canal was a smashing success, it stranded the Southern Tier, whose river system… plied by arks, rafts, and flatboats drifting downstream… had formerly been the great transportation route of western New York. We can still see that Bath was laid out to be a great metropolis, with green grassy squares and broad straght boulevards. But growth stopped, and land prices collapsed, when the Erie Canal opened.

*By 1833 we had the Crooked Lake Canal and the Chemung Canal, both of which helped a great deal, meantime bringing propseority to Watkins and Hammondsport. But the Southern Tier economy didn’t really recover until the Erie Railroad opened in 1851.

*At 4 PM on Friday, January 4, Steuben County Historical Society will kick off its Winter Lecure Series with a free public presentation on the Erie Canal, held in the Bath Fire Hall. Allegany County Historian Craig Braack will be the speaker, and you are more than welcome!

Come See Some Nature Photography

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At our popular Steuben County Historical Society Winter Lecture Series, it’s sort of become a tradition that just about every year we include a NATURAL history presentation.

*The connection’s stronger than you might think – changing wildlife, for instance, largely hinges on human transformation of the land and water – in so many ways, their lives revolve around ours.

*Within living memory the appearance of a deer was newspaper fodder, and children were taken out of school to go see it. Likewise the bear, the beaver, the turkey, and the coyote were all strangers to this land, not too long ago.

*With the possible exception of coyotes, all of those creatures lived here natively until European invaders clear-cut huge swaths of our land, killing off or driving out the forest species. Look at photos of Keuka or Seneca Lakes from around 1900, and you’ll see that their slopes are mostly denuded of trees.

*As farming techniques improved, less land and fewer people were needed for food production. The trees came back, and with them the wildlife, in many cases creeping up from Pennsylvania. Bears have become commonplace in the past twenty years, and the three New York populations… in the Catskills, in the Adirondacks, and a token few along the western Southern Tier… have pretty much merged.

*We hear a lot about invasive species… starlings, zebra mussels, purple loosestrife, emerald ash borers… but bears, beavers, deer, and turkeys are RE-invasive species, coming back to lands that once they knew.

*Coyotes, on the other hand, probably are in fact recent arrivals, although they fill the ecological niche once occupied by the now-extirpated wolf. Unlike the starling, say, which muscles aside native residents, the coyote is essentially filling a vacuum.

*Another native species is the otter. For otters to return we needed not only reforestation, but also cleanup… otters require pristine water. In their case we’ve been deliberately restocking, and the jury’s still out on our success. Unfortunately for our efforts the animals will often range a hundred miles to find a site they like, making it slow going to build up enough density for a breeding population.

*Eagle restocking, on the other hand, HAS been successful, pushing New York state from one breeding pair to dozens. Limiting certain pesticides has aided both them and the osprey.

*Global heating also plays a role. With grain being grown both earlier and later in the year, and farther north in Canada, the Canada goose population has exploded. The cardinal has moved north since World War II, aided by milder shorter winters AND introduction of the berry-bearing multiflora rose decorative shrub. New England fisheries have been devastated as the harvest species have withdrawn far to the north in search of cooler water.

*Allegany County Historian Craig Braack, who’s a perennial favorite history presenter at our Winter Lectures, is stepping outside his box this week to bring us a show of his nature photography. Craig spends as much time as he can manage behind a camera, joining such luminaries as Roger Tory Peterson, the Jamestown-born field guide pioneer, and General Sir Alan Brooke. Britain’s World War II Chief of the Imperial General Staff was a pioneer in wildlife photography, and stole time when he could even during the war, which no doubt helped him calm his soul.

*So Craig will be with us at Bath Fire Hall 4 PM on Friday, February 5, for our free presentation sharing his nature photos. We hope you can join us.