How did you first get involved with the Erie Canal? And how does your job relate to it?
I got my undergraduate degree in American Studies and American Literature, and my topic of interest is the American Dream. Through the interest in the American Dream, that leads you to an interest in immigration and the way that this country grows and changes. So I left undergraduate school with that kind of interest and then moved here to Syracuse to get my graduate degree in Museum Studies. While I was here I got an internship here at the Erie Canal Museum, working for the then curator, and I worked in the collections and started getting very involved and learning more and more about the Erie Canal. And, discovering really what your website shows, that it is connected to everything. The growth of this country, and this state, and New York City, is very much connected to this 363 mile, 200 year old body of water. The fact that so much of American history hinges on that topic really fascinated me. I then started working here here as the director of development and Marketing. I spent 3 years here doing that. I left for a little while and explored a different part of upstate New York American history, the Seward House in Auburn where I learned a lot about the Civil War, Mr. Seward, and his purchase of Alaska, and all that stuff. Then I came back here to be the Executive Director, not very long ago and I love the stories that you can really tell from this canal. So my job is focused very much around the canal, getting people interested in it, making sure that conversations are happening about the Erie Canal, and what it was, and what it is, and what it did, and all those really great big picture things.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
What purpose does the Erie Canal serve today?
The Erie Canal has ebbed and flowed, no pun intended, as far as popularity goes. Right it is actually gaining use again for commercial use. It has a very heavy recreational use, people going kayaking, you can go on a dinner cruise, all sorts of things. But, more and more really large things are being shipped on the canal again, like the pieces of wind turbines. They are almost too big to fit on a highway, or they really are too big to fit on the backs of trucks. They don’t fit on trains very well, but you can float them on a canal boat pretty easily. So the canal is kind of gaining in commercial momentum again, which is really nice to see. But opposite those lines, there is the old canal, portions of it that still exist, not the entire thing. It is used for strolls. You can walk your dog along the towpath. Every year, New York State has a bike ride that goes all the way from I think Albany to Buffalo, maybe Buffalo to Albany, can’t remember. But there’s a bike ride of hundreds of cyclists that come from all over the country to ride their bikes along the towpath on the old canal. So, the canal today exists in many different parts and many different pieces, but also as a fully intact, functioning canal as well. It’s a really good thing they widened it.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Could you please elaborate on the political controversy that surrounded the canal?
So the idea of this canal came about long before there was a United States of America. As I am sure you are very well aware, there is a very large mountain range that goes from Canada to Georgia, and there’s not a lot of break in it, so getting west is complicated. There is one very significant break at the Mohawk Valley. So long ago, explorers, politicians, saw this break in the mountains and said ‘You know, that could be our chance. That could be our way west. Thomas Jefferson even saw it, George Washington even saw it and mentioned it. However the idea of building this long waterway was something that the federal government was afraid of. They didn’t see it as a task in the 1800s that they could take on. And, New York State said ‘No, you are going to want to be a part of this. It will be huge’. What that looked like, nobody had any idea. Nothing like this, even close to this, had been done before. So trying to get this canal built became huge political battle. And in the end, it really was DeWitt Clinton who ran for governor of New York State on the Erie Canal, which was basically how he got elected. He managed to secure private financing to get the canal built, because the federal government didn’t want to take the risk. So thankfully, because DeWitt Clinton and the State of New York were willing to take the risk, we got the canal.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Besides the dangers of the digging itself, what complications were faced during the construction?
The few hardest issues really had to do with the elevation change. New York is not flat, this is kind of a river valley, so it goes up and down pretty heavily. We actually have in our staircase here, a to-scale model of the elevation difference between Albany and Buffalo, and it’s done in a staircase in a two floor building. So you can see really how that changes. So figuring out how to build those locks and what that would look like, was a huge challenge for these people. And I say these people because they weren’t a group of engineers. They were all thinkers who thought this would be a good idea. So really huge challenges for really just the mechanism of it, how this is going to happen. The fact that they built it piece by piece and it still worked is remarkable. That they built it all, that it connected and that the locks opened, and that the water flowed. Wouldn’t it be a bummer if you got to Lockport and said ‘Oh no, they’re two miles up that way.’ Engineering was not what it is now, so that it worked I think is pretty incredible. Figuring out how to go through the Syracuse area, it was a swamp, and the buildings that existed here in Syracuse were up on stilts at the time. So figuring how to get a canal filled with water through an area that’s already filled with water was a challenge.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Why did the original route not make use of the lakes of upstate New York?
The original canal, as you know, was completely man-made and the reason for that was because they hadn’t come up with the technologies to make natural bodies of water navigable. So the Mohawk River was full of rushing rapids, and rocks, and boulders. There weren’t damming technologies yet. And now, with the current Erie Canal, a large portion of it is made up of natural waterways. That’s just because through time, by about the turn of the century, we had technologies to calm waters, to raise the water in those lakes, and dam it to make it so that we could navigate around it. They just didn’t know how to that then, and just going through lakes, even still going across Oneida Lake can be challenging, you never know what’s happening in the middle of that lake. They had to build it completely man-made so that they could control it.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Is there any reason why digging began in Rome?
They started in the middle and in a place that wasn’t too difficult. They specifically picked Rome because it was in the middle of the state and it wasn’t a swamp, it wasn’t too rocky, it was a place where everybody could gather together and they could start without too much challenge. It was finished first from Rome to Utica, which isn’t a very long portion, but that was the first portion done. It was in Syracuse by 1820, the first boat coming in August of 1820. Every time they got a part finished, they opened it up. The canal was being used pretty heavily before it was completed. But the interesting part with locks is that locks really do close it off. For example, there was a pretty large disaster here in Syracuse around 1890, where the canal went over Onondaga Creek. And there was a hole in a short aqueduct, in the canal, and it had created a giant whirlpool, and all the water was draining out, and did drain out. But they had the ability to be like “close the locks,” and they closed the locks, and it didn’t drain a canal’s worth of water, just between the two locks. But it was such a big whirlpool pressure that it made the backs of buildings fall off, one of which was full of flour, so there are pictures of the whole area covered in a white dusting because the flour was everywhere. So the locks really made it possible to finish a portion of the canal, you could stop the water and use it until the next portion was open.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
In your opinion, how do you feel the Erie Canal established the economic structure of New York?
It brought a lot of money into New York. Even, I told you about Clinton’s Square before, when you go out to Clinton’s Square and look at all these giant, grand buildings, a majority of them, really all of them, were banks. And, in figuring out what to do with this money, how to use this money, was a brand new concept. Like you said, I didn’t even know, but it makes complete sense that there weren’t millionaires before the Erie Canal, so there was this challenge of what to do with money. I would guess that the stock exchange and investments, in figuring out what to do, because you can’t shove a million dollars under your mattress, you use it, you invest in things. New York really became the Empire State because of the canal. There was just so much money, and we figured out what to do with it.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
And with so many people coming in too?
Money was not evenly dispersed, the guys at the top got a lot of the money, and the people working on the boats, the mule drivers, the boys taking care of the mules and walking on the towpath with the mules, they didn’t see the money that the guys at the top saw.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
This is just something we noticed, we visited and noticed the blue and yellow theme, could you explain that?
Those are New York’s colors, like the license plates are blue and yellow. All the boats, the New York State owned boats, tugboats that exist on the canal are all blue and yellow. It wasn’t that way on the original, “Clinton’s Ditch” was enlarged. If you see a boat on the Erie Canal and it’s blue and yellow, then you know it’s a New York State boat.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
How did immigrants impact the construction of the canal and the era of the canal’s operation?
The original construction of the canal, from 1817-1825 didn’t actually involve a lot of immigrants. There weren’t a lot of immigrants to our country quite at that point. Ellis Island didn’t exist, New York City wasn’t a huge metropolitan area. So the original portion of the canal was built mostly by people who lived along the path, farmers. People they could pay a day’s wage to to build a couple miles. However, that enlargement began in the 1830s, just a few years later, and a huge portion of that was built by immigrants, Irish immigrants got really involved. All of that had to do with the East, so you could come into New York City, hop on a boat and head on over. You could find work all along, they needed these laborers, and a lot of the people coming over had been laborers, they were farmers, they were people who worked with their hands. Italian immigrants were stone masons, there was a whole village, outside of Buffalo, I believe, that became this stone mason village, and people would dig the stone and create the stone that could be used to enlarge this canal. Without the immigrants, the immigrant population coming into the country, there’s no way the canal would’ve become what it did, we would’ve reached some sort of standstill at some point. Immigrants had a huge impact on the canal, and the canal had a huge impact on the ability of people to find work and move across the country.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
What factors went into determining the route of the canal?
Mostly it had to do with geography. At the terminus of the canal, they took a lot of time trying to decide whether it should be Buffalo or some other small town north of Buffalo that I can’t even tell you the name of because they didn't choose it. It definitely had some political factors, those two towns both spent a lot of time and money appealing to the people who were planning the route, to decide and say “choose us, we would make a great end,” and they finally went with Buffalo because, if i remember correctly, it was more on Lake Erie, it had a more natural port. There were definitely some political things that went into choosing the route, but it was mostly geography.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
And how long did that decision take, and getting permission?
I'm not sure. I know they went back and forth trying to choose the route for many years, and that goes back to trying to decide if it should go up through Oswego or go out, all the way out west. The War of 1812, although it was over at that time, when they were making the decision, the final decision, they didn’t want Canada to have any power here, so they chose the eventual route going out to Buffalo instead of going up to Oswego.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
How influential was the route in the eventual success of the canal?
Before the Erie canal came through New York State, Route 20 was kind of the way that you could get through New York State. It was the unpaved, corduroy road, plank road, but it did take you through New York State, and you still can drive through New York State on Route 20, it’s a beautiful drive. Route 20 has lots of great cities on it, Auburn, Skaneateles, all kinds of things. Beautiful, small, little quaint towns, however, in 1817, 1820, they were big cities in New York. Auburn, which is about 30 miles west of here, it’s population was much, much larger than Syracuse in 1820, but because the canal did not take the same route as Route 20, it built these new cities. Albany, Syracuse, Rome, Buffalo, all of these cities along the route of the canal grew up right along it. Syracuse would not be what it is today without the canal. We were a salt town, and a very hardworking group of people in the salt industry, but it would not become what it did without the canal to transport it. The canal made huge economic impacts on the cities around it.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
So was there like a salt marsh?
Up a little bit north of here, where a giant mall is now, there’s a town of Salina, which was a salt marsh, and they built these big, flats because the salt was all in an underwater lake, which was all salt water, because the lake we have, Onondaga Lake is not a salt water lake, but was all underground, so they’d pump it out of the ground and lay it out in these large bins, and basically using evaporation, with all the water evaporated, they’d gather up the salt. The majority of the salt used in the world came from Syracuse, but not anymore.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
What were the main sources of water for the canal?
It came from all sorts of places, obviously the Hudson River and the Mohawk River, and Lake Erie, the water came in from there, but all along the canal, there were little streams that helped feed it. It took a lot of work.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
How did the canal impact the boating industry, packet boats, and the development of new kinds of technology in that area?
Just like everything with the canal, they didn't know what they were doing, so everything was kind of from scratch. Boat builders built these original boats, and then technology improved, and they could build bigger boats, and then technology improved and they could build bigger boats, and then they had to make a bigger canal, and then they had to make another bigger canal. The original boats were all animal-powered, typically mules because they were a little stronger and easier to manage than horses, but then steam technology evolves, and boats get bigger and use steam. Now you’ll see large barges that will pull into the locks, with an inch on either side of the lock, and they were built specifically to be that size, to fit right in the lock. The boats are kind of like the immigrants, the boats had an impact on the canal, and the canal had an impact on the boats. Figuring out bigger and better ways to transport more and more goods, utilizing this limited in size resource, it was probably a challenge for the boat community. Luckily, having immigrants come over that had boat building experience had a large impact to make things possible.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Is there anything else you would like to add pertaining to the exploration, encounter, and exchange involving the canal?
One of the things that we talk about in Syracuse is that, actually right in front of this building was the end of the Oswego Canal. The Oswego Canal went up to Lake Ontario, and then it came and ran into the Erie Canal, and because of that, all the banks that are here, a lot has to do with the fact that it was the terminus of the Oswego Canal. Syracuse might not be as big as it was if it hadn’t been the end of a canal, as well as the middle of a canal. The exchange that occurred in this city with the cultural exchange, the population that made up Syracuse is diverse, we weren’t founded by the Irish, the Italians, or the Germans, it was a very diverse population and continues to be so. We are one of the refugee settlement locations and so we continue to be this glowing, prosperous city because of the diversity here. A lot of that is because of this “T” intersection resulting from the terminus of the Oswego Canal and the middle of the Erie Canal, and the willingness to think outside the box. It enlightened people to have this freedom to explore. You could hop on a boat and head down the canal for a few miles, and it’s still active today.