Tag Archives: Erie Canal

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!

Four-Month Canal Journey Climaxes at Watkins Glen

Darn that busybody DeWitt Clinton! His Erie Canal was one of the most spectacular successes of the age, but it was a disaster for the Southern Tier.

*Up until then the Chemung-Susquehanna River system was the great highway of western New York, with its connections to the Tidewater, Baltimore, and Chesapeake Bay. Bath, with its green squares and broad boulevards, was laid out to be the region’s great metropolis.

*That all slammed to a halt when the great canal opened in 1825. There were conventions and mob actions down here as crop prices and land values crashed instantly, leaving people with mortgages they could never pay off. The Land Office finally negotiated a revaluation.

*Meanwhile, little no-account shanty towns like Buffalo, Syracuse, and Rochester started to boom.

*Things improved for us when the Crooked Lake Canal opened in 1831, making Hammondsport a true port and putting Steuben-area farmers back into the game with a connection to the Erie system. Two years later Chemung Canal opened, eventually linking Corning and Elmira with Watkins Glen and Seneca Lake.

*All of that helped, but completion of the Erie Railroad in 1851 linked the Southern Tier with New York, Lake Erie, and Rochester. At that point, business truly started to revive.

*By 1868 those railroads had caught the attention of officials at the Brooklyn Flint Glass Works. The Erie gave Corning a major east-west mainline, and a major branch up to Rochester. The Fall Brook brought up coal, wood, sand, and charcoal from Pennsylvania. Raw materials could come in by rail, and finished products go out, and many costs were lower than they would be in Brooklyn. Corning could be a VERY attractive spot for relocation, and the decision was soon made.

*But while the railroads were a major consideration, another key factor was the canal. The Glass Works would lose some time, but save a good deal of money, shipping their factory equipment by canal.

*Barges loaded up at Brooklyn were towed up the Hudson to Albany, then transitioned into the Erie Canal as far as Montezuma, and junction with the Cayuga and Seneca Canal. Thence they made their way to Geneva and up Seneca Lake to Watkins, into the Chemung Canal, then a few rods on the Chemung River itself to Monkey Run and their new home along the waterfront of the Southside… just where so many of us recall the Glass Works always being.

*And that was in 1868 – exactly 150 years ago! Brooklyn Flint Glass Works became Corning Flint Glass Works, then Corning Glass Works, the Corning Incorporated (but still CGW on the stock exchange).

*To celebrate the sesquicentennial, GlassBarge (from Corning Musuem of Glass) and canal schooner Lois McClure (from Lake Champlain Maritime Museum) set out from Brooklyn back in May, accompanied by 1930 tug W. O. Ecker and 1964 tug C. L. Churchill. Like their predecessors they traveled up to Albany, but this time went the enture length of the Erie Canal to Buffalo, before reversing course to pick up the Cayuga-Seneca Canal, heading for Geneva, Seneca Lake, and Watkins Glen – as far as you can get, nowadays, by barge – to complete their odyssey.

*Art Cohn of Lake Champlain Maritime Museum observes that the new company’s arrival by a line of barges apparently didn’t attract much attention in Corning, though of course we now know that it was a historical thunderbolt. But this year’s little flotilla should get more notice as it opens to the public, at Watkins, from 11 to 6 on Friday through Sunday, September 14-16. I wouldn’t miss it. Maybe I’ll see you there.

The Farming Story Part 3: Canals, Railroads, and War

Everyone was very relieved when the 1816 “Year Without a Summer” turned out to be a fluke, and growth resumed until the even-more disastrous year of 1825, when that busybody DeWitt Clinton went and opened the Erie Canal. While a spectacularly excellent thing over all, it hit the Southern Tier like a neutron bomb, completely wrenching all the patterns of travel and commerce. You can still see that Bath was laid out to be the great metropolis of western New York, with traffic running down the Conhocton and Chemung to the Susquehanna and the Chesapeake Bay. Now Bath stalled while little no-account shanty towns like Buffalo, Syracuse, and Rochester started to boom.

*Land prices down here collapsed, and farmers suddenly found themselves paying mortgages that far exceded the new values of their properties. There were demonstrations, near-riots, and conventions until they finally held a summit conference with representatives from all the towns, and the Land Office agreed to revalue all the properties.

*Opening the Crooked Lake Canal in 1833 ameliorated this to some extent. While not in Steuben, it drained commerce on Keuka Lake into Seneca Lake and thence to the Erie Canal system. Hammondsport became a true port, transshipping goods from as far away as Pennsylvania up to Penn Yan and the canal. The later Chemung Feeder Canal, linking Corning with Watkins on Seneca, also helped.

*Steuben County was larger back then than it is today, and the 1835 gazetteer showed that 43% of its land – almost 40,000 acres – was “improved,” that is, cleared and useable for farming. This was quite an accomplishment for a feat done entirely with hand tools and draft animals, in about four decades. Of course it was also an ecological holocaust, and an open invitation to flooding.

*Steubeners in 1835 owned 43,000 cattle, 11,000 horses, a hundred thousand sheep, and 36,000 swine. They owned and operated 43 grist mills, 257 sawmills, two oil mills, 18 fulling mills, two paper mills, one iron works, three woolen factories, five distilleries, two breweries, 19 asheries, and 32 tanneries. So all those sawmills, asheries, and paper mills prove that lumbering was still vital.

*The Crooked Lake Canal helped, but real revival began with completion of the Erie Railroad main line in 1851, serving Corning, Painted Post, Addison, Cameron Mills, Canisteo, Hornell, Arkport, and Almond. The Rochester Branch soon also served Coopers Plains, Campbell, Savona, Bath, Kanona, Cohocton, and Wayland. By the time of the 1860 directory there was actually LESS improved land, but there was also less TOTAL land, thanks to the loss of several townships, so the percentage had climbed from 42 to 45. Steuben folks now owned more cattle, sheep, and horses than they had in 1835, but considerably fewer swine.

*The 1860 gazetteer also tells us something about their PRODUCE. Steuben folks annually produced over 1.5 million bushels of grain; 60 thousand tons of hay; more than a quarter-million bushels of potatoes; almost 300 thousand bushels of apples; 2 million pounds of butter; and 200 thousand pounds of cheese. Much of this, ESPECIALLY the dairy products, would have been useless without fast transportation. According to this gazetteer, “In extent of territory and in agricultural wealth [Steuben] now ranks among the first [counties] in the state.”

*I can’t state this for a fact, but I assume that Steuben followed the general national trend of mechanizing its farming during the Civil War. Thousands of young men who normally would be swinging scythes were now shouldering rifles. Production was kept up by mechanical combines, reapers, and the like.

*This meant that farming became much more CAPITAL-intensive and much less LABOR-intensive. It took more monetary investment, and larger farms, to farm successfully, and it was harder to find a job in the field, even for the men who came back from the war. Many of the veterans who populated the “Soldiers’ Home” (now Bath V.A.) after 1878 were only winter residents. During the growing season they got those jobs that were still left, or they went back to family farms as unpaid extra hands. But the work wasn’t there to employ them ’round the year.

A Visit to Brockport (At Last!)

Last week we finally visited Brockport, which we’d been meaning to do for several years. Brockport is home to a S.U.N.Y. campus, of course, but it also bills itself as “the Victorian village on the Erie Canal.”

*And a very pleasant place we found it to visit. Even with the campus, it makes a compact village, divided by the canal, with the north side (what little we saw of it) appearing to have been largely developed in the mid-20th century.

*We were glad to find that there are several municipal lots with free parking, so we pulled up right off Main Street, overlooking the canal and hard by the welcome center. For future reference, we saw that you can borrow bikes here, and use the canalside bicycle path. This was a sunny but breezy April day, so I decided anther time would be better.

*So we strolled the few steps back to Main Street and turned south to our destination, Lift Bridge Bookstore. This was really the purpose of our trip, since we’ve encountered the Lift Bridge folks several times at the Rochester Children’s Book Festival, where they are the sole vendor.

*And, Lift Bridge lived up to our expectations! We spent quite a while prowling and browsing, while I jotted down titles for future reference. The store includes a large children’s section, and Joyce bought a picture-book biography of Roger Tory Peterson. When she inquired about a particular book that was out of stock, the staff opened up the day’s shipment to check for her.

*Though I had several titles in mind, one kept calling to me all through the store. So as we were getting ready to leave I took a deep breath, and bought “The Blood of Emmett Till.” This has been on my to-read list for some time, despite my own P.T.S.D. I’m reading through it now, and it’s rough, but it’s incredibly important. I’m going slow, but I’m doing it at last.

*Joyce had spotted the Red Bird Cafe so we walked there (a block back toward the canal) for quiche (me) and a sandwich (her). Then I walked her to the quilt shop, about-faced, and went to the comic book store… Collector’s Corner. Here I met owner George, who’s wearily getting ready for Free Comic Book Day (first Saturday in May – drop in on him), and after thoroughly working my way through the whole store I got Al Williamson’s “Hidden Lands” and “Road to Perdition Volume 2: On the Road.”

*Back on the sidewalk I made the faux pas of walking while studying the mural on the facade of Lift Bridge books across the street, and almost ran down an older gentleman stepping out of a coffee house. We fell into conversation as we walked, and when he learned that he lived in Bath, he told me that the first mass he attended after his wedding was at St. Mary’s church… small world.

*Joyce was just checking out when I arrived at the quilt store… perfect timing. Brockport’s downtown is a National Historic District, and we walked south on Main Street taking in the shops, the 19th-century churches (including an Episcopal Jubilee Center), and the very interesting fire house, with its large September 11 statues.

*Then we reversed field and retraced our steps, down to the lift bridge itself and across the canal just to sample the north side a little bit. Brockport has two lift bridges within sight of each other, giving the small town an enjoyable blend of technology, transportation, architecture, history, retail, and higher education. One historial marker describes Brockport as “a museum without walls.”

*When we got back to our car we saw a cooper’s hawk sailing along above the canal. A drive toward Lake Ontario took us through the orchards of the fruit belt and a countryside more rural than we’re used to even in Steuben County, but much more of it is in cultivation, rather than woodland. It’s also far, far FLATTER than we’re used to in Steuben.

*We didn’t see much of the S.U.N.Y. campus, so I may be doing it a disservice, but it struck me as being rather featureless, much like the campus of my own beloved Rhode Island College. They have similar histories, starting out as normal schools or schools of education and blooming in the postwar decades into full colleges, and a let’s-get-the-job-done architectural feel. I felt right at home.

*Besides the Red Bird we had a range of choices for our evening meal: coffee houses, pizza places, Texas hots, a soul food place. We selected the Brockport Diner, which was packed on Friday night – Greek spaghetti for Joyce, a mini fish fry for me. And since I never did get to the lower level used-book section at Lift Bridge, we’ll be back for more – maybe this summer.

200 Years Ago — The Way We Were, in 1817

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In 1817, folks in Steuben and around the Northern Hemisphere were overjoyed to learn that the disastrous 1816 “Year Without a Summer” had been an aberration.

There were 11 towns within today’s boundaries of Steuben County — Addison, Bath, Canisteo, Cohocton, Corning (then called Painted Post), Dansville, Howard, Prattsburgh, Pulteney, Troupsburg, and Wayne. But in 1817 Steuben County stretched all the way to Seneca Lake, and further up Keuka Lake, so there were towns (Barrington, Reading, Tyrone) that are now in Yates or Schuyler Counties.

Steuben County had 21,989 people in the 1820 census, and 179 of them were nonwhite. Of them, 46 were slaves.

John Magee, who had only recently arrived in Bath, was farming for Adam Haverling at eight dollars a month. He would parley this into a banking, mining, and transportation empire, several fine mansions, and two terms in Congress. Ira Davenport, a pioneer merchant in what’s now Hornellsville, was laying the foundation of his own fortune. Joel Pratt was 73 years old, and Silas Wheeler was 67. Both men had fought in the Revolution, as had James Monroe, who became our fifth president on March 4th.

Up in Rome, work got going on the Erie Canal. Although a great thing in general, the canal, once opened, collapsed the economy of the Southern Tier, which depended on the Conhocton-Canisteo-Chemung-Susquehanna River chain. That would also kill Bath’s prospects for becoming the great metropolis of western New York. But Bath already had its beautiful boulevards and its open squares, and keeps them to this day.

In Hartford, Connecticut, the American School for the Deaf opened. Henry David Thoreau was born, and Jane Austen died. Robert E. Lee was about 10 years old, and Abraham Lincoln a year or two younger. The Lincolns had just moved from slaveholding Kentucky to the free territory of Indiana. Ulysses S. Grant was not yet born. John Brown was at a co-educational college preparatory school in Connecticut. Twelve-year-old Joseph Smith had just arrived in the Finger Lakes.

No one had ever heard of Charles Darwin, James Fenimore Cooper, Davy Crockett, or Edgar Allen Poe. A trip from Bath to Dansville would cost you a couple of days. Husbands had complete control over their wives’ income and assets. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was two years old.

Mississippi became the 20th state in 1817. Louisiana was the only state west of the Mississippi River. America did not yet include Texas, the southwest, or the Pacific coast. No steam ship had ever crossed the Atlantic. Telegraphs and cameras wouldn’t exist for another 20 years.

Here in New York, Allegany County already existed, but Schuyler, Livingston, Yates, and Chemung did not. DeWitt Clinton became governor, and George McClure was sheriff of Steuben County. The 1824 gazetteer reported that Steuben had 18 post offices, 156 school districts, 40 grist mills, 102 sawmills, two oil mills, an iron works, two textile mills, 30 distilleries, 30 asheries, and 22,600 “neat cattle” — just about one per resident!