The Erie Canal

The Erie Canal ran 363 miles / 584 km across upstate New York, from the Hudson River near Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo, and when it opened on October 26, 1825, it turned the Great Lakes into an extension of the Atlantic seaboard. Boats had to climb roughly 568 feet / 173 m between the tidal Hudson and the lake, and the original canal handled that rise with 83 stone locks. The channel itself was modest, 40 feet / 12 m wide and just 4 feet / 1.2 m deep. Its real achievement was the route.

The canal works because of a break in the mountains. Through its eastern stretch it follows the Mohawk River valley, a natural east-west corridor between the Catskills to the south and the Adirondacks to the north that offered a near-level water route west through the Appalachian uplands. Beyond Rome the line crosses the lowlands of central New York past Syracuse, spans the Genesee River on an aqueduct at Rochester, and meets its steepest obstacle at Lockport. There, two parallel flights of five locks lifted boats about 60 feet / 18 m up the Niagara Escarpment, the same rock ledge that Niagara Falls pours over.

Digging began at Rome on July 4, 1817, and the original canal cost about $7.1 million. It was enlarged in the 1800s, then largely rebuilt between 1905 and 1918 as the Barge Canal, which abandoned much of the old ditch for canalized rivers and lakes. Today's canal runs about 351 miles / 565 km with roughly three dozen locks. It begins at the meeting of the Hudson and Mohawk rivers at Waterford, where the Waterford Flight of five locks is among the steepest in the United States, crosses Oneida Lake, and ends on the Niagara River at Tonawanda.

The Erie is now the main branch of the New York State Canal System, which also includes the Champlain, Oswego and Cayuga-Seneca canals. In 2000 Congress designated the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor, which covers 524 miles of waterway across 23 counties and 4,834 sq mi, home to about 3.2 million people. The canal has carried boats for 200 years without a break, and the 365-mile Canalway Trail follows much of the old towpath. The cities strung along the old route, from Albany and Utica to Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo, still trace the line the canal drew across the state.