The Erie Canal: The man-made waterway that transformed the US | Hacker News Reader

The Erie Canal: The man-made waterway that transformed the US

bbc.com

86 pointsbookofjoe41 comments

These type of lock-based canals are really beautiful and elegant pieces of engineering. Capable of lifting hundreds or even thousands of tons up-hill without the use of any motor, or engine and taking advantage of the natural gravity gradient adjacent to naturally occurring streams and rivers. In many ways they're literally powered by the water cycle created by the sun.

It's really interesting to understand that these were the technological state-of-the-art before the steam engine and were among the most advanced means of transportation technology on the planet after the big European sailing ships (which in turn were among the few technologies on the planet for hundreds of years capable of moving humans across around the surface of an entire planet relatively quickly).

Canal tech is so energy efficient that it's possible to move relatively large barges using only human power [1] (though it was far more common to use other large animals like horses or mules).

1 - The painter Ilya Repin famously captured this in a painting called the "Barge Haulers on the Volga" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barge_Haulers_on_the_Volga

The Augustow Canal[0][1], on the UNESCO World Heritage tentative list, is a nice one that was hailed as a technical marvel in its day. It was originally constructed as the result of high Prussian customs on the Vistula following the partition of Poland. (The Vistula was the principal trade route for Polish trade for centuries. The wealth of historic ports on the Vistula river are a testament to this fact, with something like 60% of Polish grain exports, the most lucrative export by total revenue, taking this route. The partitions divided the river and its ports between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, hence why the canal was built in the Russian partition).

Today, it is a nice scenic waterway for kayaking and other vessels.

[0] https://www.augustow.pl/en/augustow-canal

[1] https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g274739-d69939...

The Erie Canal, and the rest of the entire navigate-able water system is relatively unknown, but is a huge huge reason why we have a United States of America, and not 50 different countries with fractured cultural, military and social histories.

The USA has more interior navigable rivers and waterways than the rest of the world combined. The Erie Canal's connection made it possible to circumnavigate the northeast, northwest, and a good chunk of the Midwest and Canada without ever leaving a protected waterway, thanks to the Mississippi system, New Orleans, barrier islands, and the Great Lakes.

It's fair to say innit that it connected the American breadbasket with world markets.

It also made Buffalo the largest inland port in America, at least until Chicago took the crown and Buffalo was largely relegated to transshipment. Buffalo still has quite a collection of grain elevators tho.

Many of the boomers were taught to sing a song about the Erie Canal in elementary school. How many of us retained any information about, who knows?

Some of us younger folk know the song too: it’s been playing in my head as I’ve been browsing through this thread.

I'm from upstate NY, my mother used to sing this song to me as a child.

> The Erie Canal, and the rest of the entire navigate-able water system is relatively unknown

What? It's taught in american schools. Who hasn't hear of the erie canal?

> but is a huge huge reason why we have a United States of America, and not 50 different countries with fractured cultural, military and social histories.

If that was the case, the civil war wouldn't have occurred. The Erie Canal was about making western expansion easier. Plans for the erie canal was developed decades before independence. The federal government, single currency, civil war, etc were the binding force, not the erie canal.

The federal government as a binding force was not really that effective until after the civil war. See the repeated failure to build the transcon railroad which the south blocked fearing the entrapment of the south by another transportation system.

It's just been in the news again recently because a 260 feet long pedestrian bridge, which was built in Italy, was floated up on barges to a park being built in Buffalo. Being able to transport this large structure by water helps avoid closing roads to traffic or navigating under low street bridges. It attracted crowds all the way up.

"This is a big deal because this used to be a commercial canal and nowadays it's not so this is an event"

https://www.wgrz.com/article/news/local/ralph-c-wilson-bridg...

I live in Rochester (East of Buffalo) and my house is next to the canal. I ride the canal path on my bike regularly and caught sight of the barge on Monday as it was heading West. You don't see much commercial traffic on the canal these days. The last time anything remarkable was shipped via the canal was a few years back when Genesee brewery had some new malt storage silos delivered.

I'm from Syracuse (East of Rochester). My gf and I just went back to visit and spent a lot of time riding/running along the canal. It must have been wild to see a pedestrian bridge floating down the canal. I don't think I have ever seen anything bigger than a kayak on the canal.

Another Syracusean on HN. Lots of upstaters apparently today.

Yup, grew up in East Syracuse about 2 miles from the Erie Canal. Rode my bike many hundreds of miles east and west as a kid.

Grew up in Cicero, NY

I'm from Rome (East of Syracuse) and I don't really have any good canal stories. I actually live near Rochester now and we go on bike rides on the canal trail pretty frequently. It's quite flat and a little boring but pretty. There are lots of YouTube travel vlogs of folks biking the whole canal. You can camp at the locks, just watch out for the mosquitos!

Ok, I think maybe Utica or Amsterdam is up next.

I saw the news of it crossing the lock in my town basically an hour after it happened, was disappointing to miss it. Used to walk over that bridge every day to school.

The old canal towpath is part of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park and just a few miles from my house. We hike and bike there frequently. The canal itself is mostly filled in with sediment and is little more than a damp trench punctuated with sections that are full of stagnant water (and some sections where the water flows). The various locks work like mile markers and are all still quite visible as they were renovated in concrete back in 1913 or so.

One near me, Ohio lock 31[1], has a frightening history of murder and danger. It was a very remote lock and bodies were dumped there as highwaymen operated with lethal intent. Now it is my turnaround point for hiking that stretch of the old towpath.

1 - https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/ohio/cleveland/lonesome-lock...

That's part of the Ohio & Erie Canal[1], not the same canal as the Erie Canal[2] in the OP, that runs through upstate New York.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_and_Erie_Canal [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Canal

Upstate is considered what area, everything above new york city?

These days, people north of the Finger Lakes, Mohawk Valley and the southern part of the Adirondacks often call those northern counties "Northern New York" or "North Country."

I'm not really going to try to resolve the definition except to say that no part of New York is in Ohio.

The summer of 2005 I was working at Canal and Warner where they put in the bridge to bring the towpath trail over Warner. When they went to pour the concrete for the east side of the bridge, they backed the concrete truck down the towpath next to the foundation hole.

Either the side of the hole collapsed or the driver dropped a wheel into it because the truck ended up on its side atop all the rebar. Nobody was hurt, and we got several hours of peerless entertainment watching them fish the truck out of the hole. That took three big wreckers and the construction company's excavator.

This was not the first afternoon of work we lost to watching that crew get themselves out of a jam.

Buffalo native here (where the Erie Canal ends) - the Canal is very much in use still today. No horses pulling barges though anymore!

Big news in Buffalo this week was a new pedestrian bridge just pulled into town via the Canal after spending a few weeks winding its way across the state:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/rwparkbuffalo/albums/721777203...

I don't live anywhere near the Erie Canal (but in the NL), and when she was still around my grandmother once told me of a journey by horse drawn barge. I suddenly understood how much change she had seen in her life!

Also a Buffalo native! I'm interested if this experience was universal, but in elementary school, it felt like we had a history unit about the Erie Canal every year. I must've had three field trips over the years to see the Lockport locks.

The canal system in the UK is also fascinating now. Not much freight traffic but a large number of pleasure canal boats. I've been on a couple of holidays on these and it is a great way to see some nature. Also fascinating to manoeuvre the boats, especially when you don't have bow thrusters, and virtually no steering in reverse. They are long and thin, and turn around their centres rather than 'following the front wheels' like a car. And some of the canals are only a few feet (or less) wider than the boats.

The canal network is also widely used by walkers since the vast majority of canals have tow paths and riverside pubs.

I live close to one of the oldest canals in Europe, the Finow Canal. It connects the Oder with the Havel and was constructed in 1605. The water locks are still operational but commercial freight has moved to the much larger and newer Oder-Havel Canal.

The old canal now has a bike path along most of the way, a very nice bicycle trip through the countryside north of Berlin.

Also there are beavers and kingfishers :)

Edit: also this of course, on the Oder-Havel Canal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niederfinow_Boat_Lift

Hey Chicagoans! There are some real important canals in the Chicago area, especially the ones connecting it to the Mississippi (indirectly). Is there anything like this happening there?

This is reminding me of the somewhat epic journey that was taken in 2013 to deliver a giant muon storage ring magnet to Fermilab from Brookhaven (on Long Island). It couldn't be tilted by more than a small angle anywhere in the journey, which was done by barge down the east coast, around Florida, up the eastern part of the Gulf, then via various rivers and the Tennessee-Tombigbee Canal, ultimately near Fermilab, where it was finally trucked in, very slowly, on a massive wheeled carrier.

https://muon-g-2.fnal.gov/bigmove/

I actually live in a home right on the old canal as it went through in southern Ohio. You can still see some of the old canal walls. Every time I see it, I get so bummed out the US bailed on canals as transport. You can check it out here!

https://www.stbernardhistory.org/rock-20-girl-scout-ln

Trains rendered them largely obsolete.

There were other canals tried in New York to variable (generally lesser) success, for example the Chenango Canal from Binghamton to Utica. Most eventually closed due to competition from railroads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_canals_in_New_York

The St Lawrence Seaway also took traffic away from the Erie. With modern ships, it is easier to send big ships the longer way. Barges are still useful for local traffic but the Erie was no longer the shortcut to Great Lakes. Railroads have advantage that can go more places.

> The St Lawrence Seaway also took traffic away from the Erie.

It also took traffic from the rail lines between Northern New York and points south, many of which are now disused. It also impacted rail in Canada, for instance the spur to the port of Brockville Ontario which serviced rail ferries to Morristown NY.

> With modern ships, it is easier to send big ships the longer way.

Interestingly, the Seaway was designed for the modern ships of the 1960s. The locks can't handle the new breed of giant container ships above the port of Montreal. Nowadays, the only ship traffic on the Seaway consists of "lakers" and bulk carriers. Small container ships disappeared long ago:

The early years of container shipping saw the operation of ships of under 1,000 TEU. Continued growth of international container-based trade resulted in the development of progressively larger ships, which eventually reached the maximum allowable vessel dimensions of the original Panama Canal, the early Panamax ships. Container shipping occurred along the St. Lawrence Seaway during the era of small container ships. However, these services eventually faltered, for multiple reasons.

https://maritime-executive.com/editorials/renewed-potential-...

A mention of the Welland Canal, in Ontario, that provided a route around Niagara Falls.

The Miami-Erie canal is a different canal that runs north-south through western Ohio, that was build much later than the Erie Canal that runs east-west through New York state.

That said I grew up in west central Ohio and have been fascinated with canals ever since I learned about it as a small boy. Lately I've been trying to match up historical surveys with modern day maps to show folks where the canal used to run.

And the inspiration for some beautiful guitar licks and sick shredding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwVxEAgDVZ8

The Chapo Traphouse podcast touched on the Erie Canal in Episode 557 "The Inebriated Past 10: Mormons, pt. 1", especially as the backdrop for the story of Joseph Smith and the creation, of course, of the Mormon church. It's a rousing tale told well beginning around 15 minutes in. The general thrust is that the burst of economic activity that both motivated the creation of and was in part sustained by the Erie Canal extended a tentacle of capitalistic social dislocation which, in part, was a factor in religious revival movements in upstate New York like the Mormons.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of any of this, of course. It could be just some guy yelling on the internet. I just thought it was interesting.

https://youtu.be/-cMs2BYo9nY?si=1AC8CidLpifN3Mno

Reply on news.ycombinator.com