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A long, narrow waterway interspersed with dozens of locks and lifts might not be most cruisers’ fancy. But consider the Erie Canal’s many ports, towns, marinas, lakes and its role throughout history. Paired with some recent rejuvenation, it’s a world unto itself, worth the slow pace and (diminishing) stretches of monotony. Such is the grandeur of the man-made superhighway that would put New York State on the map as “The Granary of the World.”
Before the Canal, mules were about the best mode of bulk-goods transportation European settlers could muster. Carrying about 250 pounds apiece through challenging terrain, though, the pack animals were hardly sufficient to deliver the highly demanded goods to New York Harbor, back to Mother England, and beyond. Draw a barge with a mule along a towpath, however, and that pound-per-mule ratio grows to the tune of 60,000:1. The first talk of a canalway goes at least as far back as the turn of the 18th century, but it wouldn’t be until the early 19th century that plans for what would become the Erie Canal were set in motion. Even then, the idea was balked at, derided and with a 571-foot elevation change along winding route, deemed downright impossible. President Thomas Jefferson, for one, wrote it off as “little short of madness.”
Today, the Erie Canal has seen a full 200 years of servicing all walks of mariners and maritime traffic from its initial, intended fleet of barges carrying grain, shale and everything in between, to the pleasure-cruising titans of those industries, to all of the ramblers, gamblers, bootleggers, thieves and noble, hard-working seamen. The Canal and its waters’ edge bore—and continue to bear—all walks of life.
The Canal carries but a trickle of the traffic it once did at its peak in the 1950s. Canal schooners, barges, freighters and tugs have given way to the cruisers and pleasure boats you and I use today.
“The Mother of All Cities”
Depending on whom you ask, the initial idea for the Erie Canal may have been discussed as early as 1790, but there’s no denying that early talks of it were greatly inspired by China’s 1,104-mile Grand Canal, built from the early 5th century BC to the early 7th century AD. The first funding for the Erie Canal came about shortly after a proposal written by a Bridgeport, Connecticut flour merchant who was in debtor’s prison for a failed westward shipment of products. During incarceration, Jesse Hawley penned more than a dozen essays detailing plans for a 400-mile canal from Buffalo to Albany, published in 1807 in the Genesee Messenger.
Hawley wasn’t a trained civil engineer by any stretch. Nevertheless, New York State Assemblyman Joshua Forman submitted legislation to determine whether Hawley’s proposed route was actually feasible.
It was ultimately New York State Senator-turned-New York City Mayor-turned-New York Governor De Witt Clinton who came to be credited for putting the plan into motion. Governor Clinton and his ideas were predictably met with derision and scorn, earning the proposed project “Clinton’s Folly” and “De Witt’s Ditch,” among other disparaging monikers. After all, nothing of this grand scale had ever been conceived of, let alone attempted or completed in the young United States. Further, at the time, it’s estimated that there were no more than 10 engineers in the entire United States of America; the Army Corps of Engineers had yet to be created. Its canal blueprints would be laid out along the way.
Nevertheless, some $7 million dollars ($165 million today) was afforded to the project, which broke ground in Rome, New York on Independence Day, 1817. Initially, it was mostly local farmers—many of whose land the Canal was to flow through—who were employed to dig the Canal. That grueling work was done over the course of eight years, mainly by hand and animal power, but as the work became more strenuous and demanded more laborers, work gangs were called in, including many Irish and European settlers.
By October 1819, the eastern section of the Canal was in use between Rome and Albany. Within just six more years, the entire 363-mile long, 40-foot wide, 4-foot-deep waterway connecting Buffalo to Albany and ultimately the Hudson River, New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean would be deemed complete by October 26, 1825.
Presiding over the opening ceremony, De Witt Clinton himself helmed the very first passage from Buffalo to New York City aboard the 73-foot steam-powered canal boat, the Seneca Chief.
Upon arrival in New York Harbor, Clinton produced two barrels of Lake Erie water and ceremoniously emptied them into the harbor to commemorate the mixing of waters.
“Clinton’s Folly” proved itself to be no such thing at all. Accounts and records vary, but somewhere between just a year and a decade after its completion, tolls and taxes from the Canal had covered the state’s construction debt to design and build it.
A near-constant stream of vessels flowed through the new, artificial waterway almost from the get-go, with those first passages being made primarily by freight boats and packet boats. The former, with up to 3.5-foot drafts to manage the 4-foot depth, were towed by horses or mules, on a towpath. The latter were passenger boats in essence—veritable floating lodges with kitchens, wood stoves and accommodations (bunks) for up to 40 overnight passengers.
Crossing situations on the Canal’s first rendition, as one might imagine, were particularly tight. Such a passing was methodically described by Carol Sheriff in The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862. The early vessels pulled by teams of two or three horses or mules driven by a “hoggee” had little leeway, particularly because there was only one towpath, with the opposite bank nothing but a berm of excavated soil. The vessel preceding the current (the vessel being overtaken) was (and still is) given right of way, which meant the favored vessel and its four-legged team would hug the towpath and the deferring vessel would take to the berm, or heelpath, letting its towline sink while the other boat (and team) crossed over the top of it. Coupled with the fact that horses would have to be changed frequently, things could and, as you might imagine, did get tricky.
In 1835, author Nathaniel Hawthorne took an early packet boat cruise and recanted more than one such mishap: “Several little accidents afforded us good-natured diversion. At the moment of changing horses, the tow-rope caught a Massachusetts farmer by the leg, and threw him down in a very indescribable posture, leaving a purple mark around his sturdy limb.” Another entanglement, this time with a fallen branch, ultimately left him marooned at the canal’s edge at midnight, ending his voyage abruptly. Still, he was left enamored by the splendor of the Canal.
Before even setting out, Hawthorne was so eagerly attracted to the Canal and the burgeoning, patently American life sprouting along its shores that he made plans to travel its distance from Buffalo to Albany not once but twice that summer. “I was inclined to be poetical about the Grand Canal,” began his account of traveling with a family aboard their live-aboard packet boat, overlooking or perhaps taking a jab at China’s earlier feat. He wrote the following in his recounting of the botched journey, published in New-England Magazine as “The Canal Boat”: “Surely, the water of this canal must be the most fertilizing of all fluids; for it causes towns—with their masses of brick and stone, their churches and theatres, their business and hubbub, their luxury and refinement, their gay dames and polished citizens—to spring up, till, in time, the wondrous stream may flow between two continuous lines of buildings, through one thronged street, from Buffalo to Albany. I embarked about thirty miles below Utica, determining to voyage along the whole extent of the canal, at least twice in the course of the summer.”
But the ever-curious Hawthorne wandered ashore during a hangup due to a tow-rope disentanglement, and his ride slipped away. Four miles an hour may be slow, he noted, but with a head start, it was plenty fast enough to outpace him. Hawthorne was left to seek shelter for a night and make his way to Syracuse by foot the next day. It’s unclear whether he made that second voyage—if he even finished the first—but the Canal left its indelible mark on the early American laureate.
Right around the time of Hawthorne’s misadventure, New York State—which was and still remains the sole proprietor of the Canal—voted to widen and deepen the waterway to 70 feet by 7 feet, and alter each rise to include twin locks to accommodate an ever-increasing flow of traffic. And just 15 years into the Canal’s existence, New York Harbor would lay claim to being the busiest port in the United States, moving more tonnage than Boston, Baltimore, and New Orleans combined.
The new commerce route and its subsequent expansion were completed in 1862, bringing prompt and unprecedented prosperity to Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, and giving rise to any number of mill towns and villages in between, earning it the name: “Mother of (all) Cities.”
Grifts, Vices and Great Awakenings
As far back as history goes, where there are merchant mariners, so too comes the seedier side of life. With the sudden influx of canal traffic, a fresh infusion of commerce and wealth brought the inherent underbelly of grifts and vices. Bordellos, bars, casinos and a litany of beggars and hangers-on were quickly drawn to the proverbial banquet of the Canal.
This drew disdain from an increasing number of more morally concerned citizens and, in particular, protestants of more puritanical order, giving rise to social reform and religious revivalism—namely, New York abolitionist Charles Finney’s Second Great Awakening. Finney’s movement even helped to give rise to a new religion: Founded by western New Yorker Joseph Smith, The Church of Latter-Day Saints now has an estimated 15 million followers worldwide. Talk about influence.
History has it that the less-savory elements around the Canal were somewhat successfully repelled, and the towns along its banks became relatively family friendly again. This was thanks in no small part to Smith’s Book of Mormon, whose sacred texts are said to have been discovered and translated just south of the Canal.
Still yet, the Canal’s history is further richly entwined with American history writ large: Frederick Douglass published his North Star newspaper along the Canal in Rochester. With the help of Douglass and Finney, the Underground Railroad found in the Canal a shortened route just beyond its towpath, allowing refugee slaves to transit the entire state of New York within a week as opposed to the previous monthlong trip.
Through its reaction to the unsavory elements along the Canal and a push for temperance, the Women’s Rights Movement, too, is indebted to the waterway. Early women’s rights activist and author Elizabeth Cady Stanton drove the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention—the first to call for women’s rights—and joined forces with Susan B. Anthony along the Canal, publishing The Lily, the United States’ (and perhaps the world’s) first newspaper edited by and for women. The duo used the Canal and its “packet” or passenger canal boats, which conveyed everything from pressing mail to dignitaries—to create a veritable network of freedom. The Erie canal saw its peak commercial year during this period, with some 33,000 shipments in 1855.
Less than two decades after Frederick Douglass and the Women’s Rights Movement began taking advantage of the Canal for their respective causes, it lent a hand in yet another cause: The Union Army at the outbreak of the Civil War. With a superhighway suddenly poised to deliver a flow of goods (including artillery and supplies) at a rate comparable to the Mississippi River, the Canal played no small part in the Union’s ultimate success, and perhaps led to a swifter end to that long and bloody affair.
Modern Times
The turn of the 20th century saw waterways giving way to railways, which were becoming an increasingly economical means of both transit and freight and threatened the commercial viability of the Erie Canal. Fearful and at times disdainful of the increasingly monopolistic railroad industry, President Theodore Roosevelt called for the Barge Canal to be built in 1905—a nearly $100-million-dollar ($3.5 billion today), 13-year-long undertaking that diverted the Canal and made for a 120-foot wide, 12- to 24-foot-deep waterway, including 34 new locks and the Waterford Flight, the United States’ steepest set of locks to date.
This expansion kept the Erie Canal competitive with railroads into the mid 20th century, with 1951 seeing more freight than any other year in history. Shortly thereafter, though, it gave way to Canada’s then-new Saint Lawrence Seaway to the north, even cheaper and faster freight by train and eventually, highways and semi-trucks.
Coinciding with a transportation revolution was the grinding halt in American steel production, leaving the Erie Canal and the towns and cities along it in the rust and dust. Apart from large, heavy freight such as shale heading south, commercial traffic was reduced to a drip.
By the 1980s, the Canal and the towns and cities that were born by and once dependent upon it faced a decrepitude entirely unthinkable to the Canal’s builders and travelers of the century past. But herein lies the virtue of the Canal being owned by the state alone, and not existing under the auspices of the federal government: The New York Power Authority (NYPA) created the Canal Corporation in 1992 to, among other things, rejuvenate the waterway and the communities along it. Without much red tape required, the NYPA began immediately investing tens of millions of dollars into maintenance and operation, which slowly but surely opened the floodgates to more economic opportunity.
Boaters too—especially northeastern cruisers and Great Loopers—have played no small part in the rejuvenation of the Canal. As commercial traffic bottomed out, pleasure boaters increasingly looked to the Canal as not just a seasonal passageway to move boats to and fro, but a leisurely tour. In recent years, vacant mill towns and industrial facilities have been given new life as everything from bars, restaurants and galleries to spas, bed and breakfasts and casinos.
“That’s where investments have been made,” says Jean Mackay, Director of Communications for the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor in Waterford, New York. “Some communities—just simply either because of politics or poverty or both—have a harder time making a comeback because they don’t have the resources and … they can’t compete for them and that’s where I might point you to where some of that post-industrial grit is still there. But there is that spirit of, ‘Okay, let’s keep tackling this. Let’s, figure it out.’”
Today, the NYPA invests an average of $140 million a year into not only the Canal’s functions, but the communities around it, through grants, better access, and 365 miles of New York’s 750-mile-long Empire State Trail. In anticipation of a bicentennial commemoration, the past five years have seen double the investment from the NYPA, and there may well be more on the way.
200 Years and Counting
Festivities for the Erie Canal bicentennial this year are to kick off on May 16 at 7:00 a.m. with the seasonal opening of the system, and will run through Monday, November 3 at 6:00 p.m., with a later-than-usual closure to accommodate the reenactment of the original Seneca Chief’s voyage with a full-sized replica, built by the Buffalo Maritime Center for the bicentennial. (The Seneca Chief will set sail from Buffalo on September 24 with plans to arrive in New York Harbor on October 26).
This year’s World Canals conference will be held in Buffalo with the who’s whos of the canal world, including representatives from Venice, Italy, England and China. There will also be a walleye-fishing derby, weekly Canalside concerts, a floating circus and festivals galore, with some 82 scheduled events throughout the year.
The celebrations will be best enjoyed by boat if you ask us, but by land or sea, they will surely be a sight for the ages—or at the very least, a couple of centuries.
This article originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
