Wedding of the waters, p.25
Wedding of the Waters, page 25
Toward the end of 1820, construction crews started work on the stretch running from Utica to Albany and the terminus of the canal at the Hudson River. A rapid rate of economic development followed the completion of each stretch of the canal as it flowed through charming little towns that signified their newfound prosperity with an increasing number of proud Greek revival homes. Albany itself was building a harbor facility with a wharf three-quarters of a mile long and a hundred feet wide, fully equipped with large numbers of storehouses of varying shapes and sizes.7
Utica was a remarkable little city, which had caught Clinton’s fancy on the expedition of 1810, when he admired the elegance of the houses and the shops “well replenished with merchandise.” With the canal running right through the middle of town, Utica’s commercial activity blossomed despite the absence of the dramatic waterfalls and rapids that powered the textile and grist mills to the east. The local businessmen made up for this shortcoming with a wide assortment of light manufacturing and a lifestyle that attracted a variety of cultural institutions. A traveler in 1829 reported the town was “a really beautiful place,” with wide streets running at right angles to one another and a main street, State Street, that is “in no respect inferior to [Broadway] in New York.”8 (A twenty-first-century traveler to Utica would agree. Even Union Station for the railroad line is an awe-inspiring sight in the modern world.)9
Forty miles east of Utica, Canajoharie was known for its very popular footraces in the early days of the Erie Canal, but the canal’s transportation facilities would convert the town into a large manufacturing center based on the headquarters of the Beech-Nut Company, a chewing-gum and candy firm. Farther along the Mohawk valley, there is a village originally known as Remington’s Corners in honor of Eliphalet Remington, the inventor of both the Remington rifle and the Remington typewriter. In 1828, Remington took advantage of the town’s location on the canal to develop global markets for his remarkable and highly successful inventions, but in 1843 Remington decided he did not like having his hometown named after him, and insisted on a change. The postmaster—perhaps inspired by the town of Troy farther to the east—proposed Ilion, the Greek word for Troy, a suggestion immediately approved by the local citizens as well as Remington.
By the end of 1821, navigation on the eastern section was open on the stretch of twenty-four miles from Utica to Little Falls, and the difficult excavation from Little Falls to Albany was well advanced. Furthermore, money was now coming in as well as going out. The canal collected tolls on everything from salt, gypsum, grains, timber, and bricks to passenger boats charging 5¢ per mile. Toll revenues in 1821 were nearly five times the 1820 revenue of $23,001, which covered 13 percent of the annual interest payments due on the $2.9 million canal loans outstanding at year’s end. And the work had only just begun.
The work to the east of Utica began with a particularly difficult stretch where the land drops off sharply by 105 feet over about eight miles, requiring thirteen locks one after another. Beyond that point, construction of the canal along the eighty-six miles from Little Falls to the Hudson River was a tough test of the skills of the engineers, through some of the most spectacular scenery along the entire route—scenery described neatly by one traveler as “too sublime for my dull pen.”10 The valley is seldom straight, the hills on both banks have many steep slopes right down to the river, the course of the river is narrow, and the level of the land slants steadily downward. The narrow gorge at Little Falls is the point where the Mohawk slices through the mountains. The drop from Schenectady to Cohoes Falls near Troy is the steepest part of the canal. And at the end of the line, there was the seventy-foot cataract of Cohoes Falls itself to contend with. Benjamin Wright and Canvass White spent many hours surveying all the surrounding areas in search of a more congenial route to bypass the Mohawk valley, but finally had to settle on following the river right down to the Hudson.
The landscape at Little Falls was the most defiant in the entire valley. Although there would have been no Erie Canal without that preglacial gorge at Little Falls—described by a traveler in 1829 as “the wildest place on the canal”—there nearly was no Erie Canal at all because of it.11 Squeezed between steep banks rising as high as five hundred feet above the level of the river, the torrent of white water pours down over a broad tumble of rocks and then falls over forty feet in less than half a mile through the narrowest stretch of the entire canal from Buffalo to the Hudson. The village of Little Falls connects with the canal along a large aqueduct about thirty feet over the rushing waters. Today, Little Falls combines its wild scenery and sparse remnants of the original remarkable set of locks with a cluster of high quality art dealers and a fine museum.
In June 1822, De Witt Clinton passed through this country on canal business and stopped at a small town called Palatine Bridge, twenty miles east of Little Falls, and, in a typical comment, observed that “the operations on the Canal exhibited a scene of bustle and business…. The country was filled with crops of pease, rye, wheat and Indian corn…. We saw the king bird…boblinkus…crow, blackbird, robin…and the kingfisher….[A] superb lilac in full blossom was remarkable on account of its size and beauty.”12
By November 1821, just before activity closed down for the winter, the engineers began to fill the canal with water through the grueling sixty-two-mile stretch from Little Falls to Schenectady. The work had been well done: no meaningful leaks or breakdowns in the canal walls developed. But most of the Mohawk’s passage between Little Falls and Schenectady tended to be rocky, uneven, and roiled by rapids. The engineers would have preferred to use the river if at all possible, but the effort to make the river navigable here had led the old Western Inland Lock Navigation Company to sorrow and ruin among shallows, white water, floods, and falls. In some areas, the passage was so narrow the engineers had to blast a route out of the rocks along the sides of the banks—including space for the towpath as well as the canal itself. Benjamin Wright was concerned they might even have to tunnel right through the cliffs in some places. In other areas, they built the canal high above the water, along embankments strong enough to be safe from the Mohawk’s violent seasonal flooding. Thirteen locks with a total drop of ninety feet were necessary between Little Falls and Schenectady.
The work became even more demanding below Schenectady, where the land drops over two hundred feet in the sixteen miles to Troy. Planning the construction of twenty-seven locks—almost one-third of the canal’s total—over this short stretch was just part of the problem. Traveling toward the Hudson from that point, the canal ran along the south bank of the Mohawk, but the shape of the hillsides on that bank was steeper and more irregular than on the north side. Crossing back and forth from one bank to the other seemed like an awkward solution, but the engineers figured they could actually save money if they bypassed the hurdles on the south side. Two substantial aqueducts were needed, one to go from south to north and one to bring the canal back to the south side. The northbound aqueduct just below Schenectady was 748 feet long, supported by sixteen piers that allowed the canal boats to sail along 30 feet above the roaring river. The other aqueduct, just above Cohoes Falls, a cataract as impressive for its width and thick white foams as for its height, brought the waterway back to the south bank on an even more imposing structure, 1188 feet long with twenty-six piers supporting it. This was the longest of the eighteen aqueducts on the canal. When the canal arrived at Cohoes Falls, the crews had to chop the route out of the sheer rock walls at a great elevation above the river—a job completed in eighty days, even though the English engineer William Weston had predicted it would require two years.13
The crisscross of the Mohawk, executed in large part in 1823–1824, saved $75,000 in construction costs, or nearly 30 percent of what it would have cost to go all the way on the south side of the river. Total outlays for the Schenectady-Albany section came to $540,000, most of which was spent on the sixteen-mile stretch from Schenectady to Troy. The cost per mile was thus more than double the per-mile cost of $12,000 for the portion of the canal from the Seneca River to Utica.
Later, in 1824, when the whole complicated and treacherous construction from Utica to the Hudson was complete, with all the daunting obstacles overcome, the commissioners could hardly believe the extraordinary achievement. Their report of that year admitted that if construction had begun there, without the experience gained from the earlier work on the relatively easy middle section, building the canal would have been “entirely abortive,” and the completion of the project would have been postponed for as long as a hundred years. At that happy moment, they expected the full canal to be open and operational within the next twelve months.
Although all twenty-seven locks between Schenectady and Albany were kept open day and night along this short stretch, the frequent tedious waits for canal boats moving in both directions limited the traffic pretty much to heavy cargo. The trip required twenty-four hours even when the traffic was light and much longer when it was crowded.
Passengers had the alternative of a three-hour stagecoach ride from Albany to Schenectady (the fare was 62¢ in 1829).14 This choice gave westbound travelers the opportunity to leave Albany late in the afternoon, enjoy dinner and a comfortable sleep in Schenectady, and then board the packets, or passenger boats, early the next morning. Clinton may have found Schenectady a dull town, “destitute of books,” but its strategic location between the steeply sloping landscape toward Albany and the long span of flatland toward Utica made it a busy place indeed for both passenger stopovers and transshipments of cargo.
The road from Albany to Schenectady was not a straight line. In order to travel where the hills were less steep, it ran slightly northeast to Troy on the Hudson before heading west again to Schenectady. The canal followed the same route. Troy—a town too plain to fuss with Greek words like Ilion—earned its place in history when a local woman named Hannah Montague, in a star example of American ingenuity, decided one day to cut off the collars and cuffs of her husband’s shirts and wash them separately. And thus began the nineteenth-century institution of detachable collars and cuffs. That was just the beginning of Mrs. Montague’s contribution to mankind. In the 1830s, Troy became the home of the Cluett, Peabody shirt company, manufacturer of collars and cuffs and shirts, and soon to become famous for the Arrow shirt that graced billboards and printed advertisements with many handsome faces for the next 150 years.15
Nearby, the Quakers were the first whites to settle in the small town with the romantic Indian name of Niskayuna. The Indians in Niskayuna cultivated a strain of corn with strong stalks but no pods—a perfect material for brooms. The Quakers duly took note and employed the canal to launch what later developed into a large-scale industry supplying the whole world with their brooms.
The Great Western Turnpike ran along the proposed route of the western section of the canal, beyond the Seneca River toward Rochester and ultimately Lake Erie. This roadway would be no competition to the Erie Canal. Originally an Iroquois trading path and now New York Route 5, the turnpike was so narrow wagons had difficulty passing one another, and in the spring they often got stuck in such deep mud that they could not move. The largest towns along the turnpike were barely 6000 people when canal construction began.
The hurdles to be overcome in the western section of the canal would turn out to be every bit as intimidating as in the east. There were violent undulations in the land across the canal’s route as it approached Rochester. The Genesee River in Rochester itself, running south-north, was the most extensive river crossing in the whole system, and an awesome confrontation with the Niagara escarpment would have to be resolved before the easy sail to Lake Erie would come into view.
Just east of Rochester, where in 1808 James Geddes had so joyously cried, “Eureka!,” the Irondequoit Creek runs northward through a deep and narrow valley on its way to Lake Ontario, cutting right across the east-west route of the canal. The waterway was misnamed: it was a lot more than a creek, as boats up to thirty tons made use of it on their way to Lake Ontario and beyond to Canada and the St. Lawrence River.
It was no simple matter to get a forty-foot-wide ditch full of water across a U-shaped chasm with about one mile between the top of one side and the top of the other. The low point of the U varied from forty to seventy feet below the upper rims. Consequently, the slopes down to the creek were too steep and the valley itself too narrow to provide room for locks down one side and then back up on the other side. How, then, could the crossing be established?
Geddes had originally visualized a huge embankment to carry the canal from one side of the valley to the other, where the creek would flow underneath while “boats would one day pass along on the tops of the fantastic ridges, [and] posterity would see and enjoy the sublime spectacle.” When the engineers started actually designing this embankment, they found the soil in the area was too porous and crumbly to hold together under the weight and motion of the canal. They decided to replace Geddes’s scheme with a long wooden aqueduct that would carry the canal at the height of a five-to six-story building from one edge of the gap to the other. But before they had signed all the contracts, the engineers had second thoughts about this job: the winds blowing in from nearby Lake Ontario could easily topple so tall and narrow a structure, top-heavy with the canal’s water.
The only solution was to return to Geddes’s original proposal: fill in the valley right up to its rim with a massive embankment to create a passageway that would carry the canal from one tip of the U to the other. In order to avoid blocking Irondequoit Creek in the process, a space had to be opened at the bottom of this huge pile of earth to allow the creek’s northward flow of water to wend its way up to Lake Ontario. This stone culvert, or transverse drain, was twenty-five feet high, thirty feet wide, and a hundred feet long. It had to be carefully arched to support the great bulk of the embankment looming another forty feet above it.
Imposing size was not the only problem presented by the embankment. As the earth at the trough of the valley, on either side of the creek, consisted largely of quicksand, the gigantic mound could easily slide away in a mess of mush and carry the canal along with it. To eliminate the risk of such a catastrophe, the engineers had to sink over nine hundred twenty-foot log pilings deep into the ground below the levels of the quicksand. The local earth was not cohesive enough to hold together even with the pilings, requiring the importation of different kinds of dirt from the surrounding country.*
The building of the Irondequoit embankment was where the Irish immigrants—as many as three thousand of them—made one of their largest contributions to the canal. The Irish were soon famous for their colorful ways and lilting songs such as:
We are cutting a Ditch through the gravel,
Through the gravel across the state, by heck!
We are cutting the Ditch through the gravel,
So the people and freight can travel,
Can travel across the state, by heck!16
J. J. McShane, the contractor who hired the largest number of them, was formerly a prizefighter and had worked on canals in Ireland. McShane was a tough taskmaster, but he did provide a jigger boss, a young man who went along the line handing out tots of whiskey several times a day. Even with the whiskey, working conditions must have been horrendous. The colossal mass of earth and its culvert had to be assembled with construction equipment little different from what men had used for centuries: horses and wagons, oxen, wheelbarrows (including horse-drawn three wheelers for the heaviest material), shovels—and bare hands. The crews toiled all day, even in the hottest months of the summer, before finishing the job in October 1822, after about two years of effort. The work frequently continued into the night, with nothing more than bonfires to light the canal’s progress.
Irondequoit led Philip Freneau, the first American poet of note, to declare the canal “a work from Nature’s chaos won…. Ye artists…proceed!—and in your bold career may every plan as wise appear.”17 The design, the workmanship, and the hard labor all paid off without a hitch. A well-timed rainstorm filled the canal right after the completion of the embankment, and boats immediately began traveling the waterway eastward all the way to Little Falls. Before long, these eastbound boats were passing boats in the opposite direction on their way to Rochester. One of the first of these vessels arrived at Rochester from Utica, 152 miles away, carrying eight families—a total of sixty people at a cost of $1.50 each.18 The Marquis de Lafayette himself came through in 1824, amazed as the canal “pursued an aerial route.”19
Rochester—the future home of George Eastman, the Eastman Kodak Company, and the Xerox Corporation—was headed for spectacular growth and economic importance from the very beginning. John Howison, a traveler passing through in 1820, marveled at the population of over 3000 people for a town less than ten years old. He also noted the “spacious streets…well-furnished shops, and the bustle which continually pervades them.” But the first steps to becoming a boom town this early in the Industrial Revolution in the United States began to transform natural beauties into ugly industrial sites. Howison noted that the magnificent Genesee Falls, which provide Rochester with “fine water power…are unfortunately surrounded with machinery; for the rattling of mills, and the smoke of iron founderies [sic]…neither harmonize well with the wildness of uncultivated nature, nor give any additional interest to a scene where they are so manifestly out of place.”20
