by Kirk House
Twenty months in Canandaigua debtor’s prison was a long time, but during his incarceration, Jesse Hawley wrote lengthy letters to the outside world. He didn’t bemoan his woes, agitate politically, evangelize religiously, condemn imprisonment for debt or even ask for a short-term loan. In a series of detailed, closely-reasoned essays, Hawley instead laid out plans for a canal from Albany to Buffalo – why we needed it, how we’d build it, where we’d put it and how we’d pay for it.
It was a beautiful dream, but maybe impossible. President Thomas Jefferson thought it was “little short of madness.”
A big job
But if you wanted to build a 360-mile canal, this was the place for it. Even today, we find that the Thruway, the modern canal, rail lines and Routes 5 and 20 all run parallel – sometimes in sight – of each other.
That route also joins two points that screamed for connection. Buffalo could draw down the produce of four Great Lakes and ship finished products back. From Albany, cargoes and passengers could ride downstream to New York City, the Atlantic Ocean and every seaport on the globe. If the national government wouldn’t tackle the job, the state government, badgered by Governor DeWitt Clinton, would. And in 1817, they got started.
America had surveyors, but no engineers. So, they learned on the job. And they did that job overwhelmingly with muscle power – men plying picks and shovels, draft animals hauling away “spoil.” In a few spots, they could blast with black powder. In others, they could take advantage of rushing water. Five thousand workers were new immigrants from Ireland – mostly Catholic, many illiterate. Several of them were assaulted by “good” Americans. These workers built aqueducts, dredged channels and installed 83 locks.
A stagecoach trip between Buffalo and New York City took two weeks. In 1825 DeWitt Clinton made the ceremonial first canal boat transit in nine days with a much bigger load, in far greater comfort and with time out for ecstatic community celebrations on the way. Buffalo boomed, New York City burst its seams. Syracuse and Rochester rapidly grew. The Great Lakes states finally felt like they were actually part of America.
It worked so well that tolls paid off the astronomical construction costs in one year.
A new set of challenges
The economies of Owego, Elmira, Corning, Bath and most of the Southern Tier thrived on river traffic down into Pennsylvania and Maryland. The new canal siphoned that away at a fraction of the cost. Land values collapsed, but mortgages stayed the same. Produce suddenly sold at a fraction of its recent value. After mass meetings and furious agitation, the Land Office revalued everybody’s mortgages.
Connector canals (called “feeders”) helped alleviate the problem. Corning, Elmira and Keuka Lake soon had canals to Seneca Lake, from which other canals led to Cayuga Lake and to the Erie itself. By the mid-1830s, there were twice-weekly boats between Hammondsport and New York City. Growers experimented with shipping grapes to Manhattan – and it worked. Connectors from Syracuse and Rochester reached Lake Ontario. All at once, the Finger Lakes ran on canals.
An Albany-Schenectady railroad opened in 1831 and reached Buffalo in 1842. Once the rail web spread, passenger traffic on the canals evaporated. By the Civil War, freight traffic was also dwindling. In the 1870s, most of the connector canals closed.
Even so, the Erie Canal was enlarged and modernized just a few years later. Canal building didn’t end in New York, or here in the Finger Lakes, where recreational use has come to the fore. But even after two centuries, canal-borne freight keeps on gliding through. And lots of pleasure craft.
