44 Fun Facts About The Erie Canal

Which river forms the eastern end of the Erie Canal?

The Hudson carried canal cargo on from Albany to New York City, which within 15 years had become the busiest port in America.

What relayed news of the Erie Canal's 1825 opening across New York?

Cannons placed within earshot along the route fired in turn, carrying the news from Buffalo to New York City in about 90 minutes and then back again.

Which New York governor championed the canal that opponents mocked as his 'Folly' and his 'Ditch'?

DeWitt Clinton tied his political fate to the canal and won the governorship in 1817, the year the legislature approved it.

When the Erie Canal opened in 1825, which far older waterway was still much longer?

The Grand Canal in China, the longest ever built, was dug in stages from the 5th century BC so its rulers could ship southern harvests north to feed their capitals and armies.

How deep was the hand-dug channel of the original Erie Canal when it opened in 1825?

4 feet of water was all it had, yet that was enough to float boats carrying 30 tons or more of freight behind animals walking the bank.

The Waterford Flight's five locks lift boats 169 feet, about twice the total lift of which famous canal?

The Panama Canal raises ships about 85 feet; Waterford's locks, built in the same years, climb twice that in under two miles to carry boats around Cohoes Falls.

What was done to freight boats inside the Erie Canal Museum's 1850 building?

Weighed: the building was a giant scale that set each boat's toll by its load, and the weighing ended when the canal stopped charging tolls in the 1880s.

What have many of the old towpaths, where mules once hauled canal boats, been turned into today?

Cycling trails now follow the old towpaths, so riders can now cross the whole state beside the water the mules once worked.

Before the canal made shipping cheap, what did many western farmers distill their bulky grain into for market?

Whiskey was easier to haul over the mountains than the grain it came from, so a 1791 federal tax on it set off the Whiskey Rebellion on the frontier.

Which river valley gave the canal's builders a natural gap through the Appalachian Mountains?

The Mohawk flows between the Catskills and the Adirondacks, so the canal could follow its valley west instead of crossing the mountains.

Where was Jesse Hawley when he wrote the essays that mapped out the canal's route?

In debtors' prison: Hawley had gone broke as a merchant, yet his essays, signed 'Hercules', caught the eye of New York politicians, and a decade later the state voted to build his canal.

Which president called the canal idea 'little short of madness'?

Thomas Jefferson was answering Joshua Forman, a New York legislator who had travelled to the capital to ask for federal help; the state ended up building the canal itself.

Which engineering school did an Erie Canal commissioner found in 1824?

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was founded at Troy by Stephen Van Rensselaer; the canal's own engineers had no formal training and learned the work as they built it.

On which holiday in 1817 did workers break ground for the Erie Canal at Rome, New York?

Independence Day, 1817: the first earth was turned at Rome, in the middle of the route, because nature posed tougher obstacles at both ends.

Who hired and paid the labourers who dug the Erie Canal?

Contractors each took on a short section and hired their own crews; some labourers were Irish immigrants, but most were American-born.

James Geddes and Benjamin Wright, the self-taught engineers who laid out the canal's route, had both served as what?

Judges James Geddes and Benjamin Wright learned engineering on the job, yet their canal became the training ground for the engineers who built America's later canals and railroads.

How did canal crews fell trees along the route?

They roped the top branches and winched them down: with the cable wound on a wheel turned by an endless screw, one man could topple the largest trees.

Which wetland on the Erie Canal's route laid its diggers low with fever?

Montezuma Marsh bred fevers that left the crews short of men in the warm months, so the crossing was finished after winter set in.

Which canal town grew up where the Erie Canal climbs the Niagara Escarpment?

Lockport began as a construction camp beside the double staircase of five locks that lifted the canal up the rock face, and took its name from them.

Which village lost out to Buffalo in the contest to be the canal's western terminus?

Black Rock built a pier to win the prize, but the commissioners chose Buffalo, which later swallowed its rival as a city neighbourhood.

Which boat led the 1825 opening flotilla from Buffalo to New York City with the governor aboard?

Seneca Chief left Buffalo at the head of five boats, and others, such as Young Lion of the West, joined the fleet at towns along the way.

What did New York's governor pour into the Atlantic at the 1825 'Wedding of the Waters' ceremony?

Lake Erie water went into the sea from a keg carried all the way from Buffalo, and a keg of Atlantic water travelled back to be poured into the lake.

Which building material did engineer Canvass White learn to make from local rock, sparing the canal costly European imports?

Hydraulic cement sets hard underwater, which the masonry of the canal's locks needed, and White found the right lime rock close to the canal's route.

Why were Erie Canal boats capped at four miles an hour?

Wash eroded the banks: the canal's sides were bare earth, and the waves thrown up by faster boats washed them down into the channel.

What was the driver who walked beside a canal boat's mules or horses called?

A hoggee was often a child of the boat's own family, walking the bank beside the animals to keep them pulling at a steady pace.

Which nickname did Rochester earn from the cargo that canal boats carried east by the barrel?

The Flour City's mills on the falls of the Genesee sent their barrels east by canal; when nurseries later took over, the name became the Flower City.

What were the Erie Canal's fast boats that carried only passengers called?

Packet boats carried travellers from Albany to Buffalo in about five days, less than half the time the bumpy stagecoach took.

Which tycoon used the canal each summer to ship his Cleveland company's products east?

John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil shipped refined oil by lake and canal in summer to save on freight, a cheaper alternative to the railroads until the water froze.

Which Buffalo invention of the 1840s used steam power to unload Great Lakes wheat ships for the canal?

The grain elevator, built by merchant Joseph Dart, sped cargo from lake ships to canal boats and helped make Buffalo the world's largest grain port by the 1860s.

For which secret network did the canal serve as a final leg to Buffalo?

The Underground Railroad ran along New York's canals, and from Buffalo freedom seekers had only the Niagara River to cross to reach Canada.

In the song 'Low Bridge, Everybody Down', what is the name of the singer's canal mule?

Sal has worked 'fifteen years' on the canal in the original lyric, credited to Thomas S. Allen and published in 1913; singers later changed it to the familiar 'fifteen miles'.

Which famous title was first printed in 1830 in Palmyra, a village on the Erie Canal?

The Book of Mormon came off a Palmyra press as revivals swept the canal towns, a region so fired by new faiths it was called the Burned-Over District.

What does much of the 1918 Barge Canal run through, unlike the original ditch?

Dammed rivers carry much of the route: engineers built dams to form long navigable pools, with a lock beside each, in waterways the first builders had avoided.

Which 1959 project helped push commercial traffic off the canal?

The St. Lawrence Seaway let ocean-going ships sail straight between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic, so Midwestern cargo no longer had to cross New York by barge.

What happens to parts of the Erie Canal each winter?

Drained for repairs: boats use the canal only from about May into the autumn, and crews spend the winter working on emptied locks and channels.

What did Congress designate in 2000 to protect and promote the canal system?

Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor covers more than 500 miles of waterway, yet unlike a national park it is not federal land and is run with local partners.

Which three other canals does the Erie connect within the New York State Canal System?

Champlain, Oswego and Cayuga-Seneca canals link the Erie to Lake Champlain, Lake Ontario and the Finger Lakes; branches like the Chenango were abandoned in the 1870s.

From 1992 to 2016, when the Thruway Authority ran New York's canals, what mostly paid for them?

Highway tolls from Thruway drivers subsidised the canals until the state moved the Canal Corporation to the New York Power Authority, its owner since 2017.

The Erie Canal forms one leg of which 6,000-mile boating route around the eastern United States?

The Great Loop takes boaters up the Atlantic coast, through the canal to the Great Lakes, down the inland rivers to the Gulf and back, usually over about a year.

How long was the original Erie Canal from Albany to Buffalo?

363 miles of channel were dug in eight years, almost all of it by hand, to make what was then the longest artificial waterway in North America.

A railroad opened in 1831 so canal travellers could skip the slow, lock-filled stretch between Albany and which city?

Schenectady lay just 16 miles from Albany by rail, while the canal looped north around Cohoes Falls through a long chain of locks.

What did Rochester operate in its abandoned Erie Canal bed from 1927 to 1956, after boats were rerouted?

A subway line used the old channel as a ready-made trench through downtown, and a stretch of its tunnel still lies empty beneath Broad Street.

Which Revolutionary War hero travelled the nearly finished Erie Canal in 1825?

The Marquis de Lafayette rode canal boats across New York that June on his farewell tour of America, months before the canal's official opening.

Which Founding Father's 1780s company to open the Potomac to western trade was a forerunner known to the Erie Canal's planners?

George Washington was the first president of the Potomac Company, founded in 1785 to get boats past the river's falls; short of money, it gave way to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in 1828.