Have you  ever wondered why the Dutch, English and other Europeans settling in New York found it so easy to spread westward through their mountains while their cousins in the Carolinas took so long to reach and control the Tennessee and other mountains west of the Appalachians?

Geography played a huge role as explained in F. Daniel Larkin’s 1998 paperback NEW YORK STATE CANALS: A SHORT HISTORY. The Hudson and Mohawk rivers are a natural “water level route through the Appalachians, the mountain barrier separating the eastern coastal region from the interior” (p. 9). The Hudson flows 300 miles south from the Adirondacks to the Atlantic. From Albany to Manhattan the Hudson has had port towns for over 380 years. 

The Mohawk joins the Hudson just above Albany, after a 150 mile fall from the Tug Hill Plateau. For 100 miles the river flows west to east through the Appalachian Uplands. From its great bend at Rome, the Mohawk invites man’s intervention to build water connections to Lake Ontario by way of  “Wood Creek, Oneida Lake, the Oneida River, and the Oswego River” (p. 9).

Today, though somewhat shrunken from its glory days, there still exists a 524 mile usable canal network in the Empire State (p. 7).

In 1702 the mighty Iroquois confederation petitioned the British colonial governor to facilitate canoe passage over the Great Carrying Place above Albany (p. 11). Over time for both the French in Canada and the English in New York, larger bateaux replaced canoes as freight vehicles. Serious canal building began in 1793. As locks and other improvements came along, bateaux made way for larger so called Schenectady boats.

Not long after the war of 1812, work began on a 363 mile, four feet deep ditch from Albany to Lake Erie. This had to conquer an altitude difference of 565 feet (p. 17). Needed were 83 locks, each 90 by 15 feet. Swampy areas caused so many deaths by fever in 1820 and 1821 that the first of many thousand Irish laborers were brought from New York City. Work on the Erie Canal was completed in late October 1825. Many writers traveled the route, with a range of opinions. Nathaniel Hawthorne found some of the scenery downright boring. In 1838, Englishwoman Harriet Martineau wrote, 

"I would never advise ladies to travel by canal" in New York. She sat on the deck above the cabin "having to duck under bridges every quarter of an hour, under penalty of having one's head crushed to atoms" (p. 25)

The railroads soon provided major competition for transporting both passengers and goods. By 1843 seven railroads ran between Albany and Buffalo on Lake Erie. Nonetheless the Erie Canal carried its greatest tonnage in 1880 --”a half century after railroads came to New York” (p. 39). Meantime the state government also planned and financed an immense network of lateral and connecting canals. Wherever feasible, in the Finger Lakes Region, Genesee Valley and elsewhere, connector canals sprang up and new towns grew up with them.

In mid September 2001 my wife Mary and I will go elderhosteling for a week in Rosendale under the guidance of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Historical Society, a body celebrating the history of New York’s first and greatest purely privately financed corporate canal. The Delaware and Hudson Company owned coal lands in northeastern Pennsylvania and marketed this new fuel to buyers in Manhattan. With little difficulty the Company built a 105 mile canal which connected to a very hard to build 16 mile rail line to mines at Carbondale (p. 74). By buying up other railroads, the Company later refocused its goals and survived in a new form.

The St Lawrence Seaway, with 860 foot long locks, was completed in 1958, and had been preceded by canals. Its Moses-Saunders dam between New York State and Ontario provides power to 600,000 customers. Wise extension of  water systems provided by nature propelled New York very early into national economic leadership.

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For INDEPENDENT TORCH