Postcard from Lock 7 of the Erie Canal

It is the 200-yr anniversary of the Erie Canal’s completion. The canal was the gateway to settlement and commercial activity into the American interior by way of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. It is the reason NY is called the Empire State and why NYC boomed the way it did.

The canal parallels the Mohawk River. The river connects to the Hudson River, and would have been the corridor for said activity, but for the waterfalls on the Mohawk in Cohoes, NY. Prior to the canal, seafaring ships could navigate as far as Albany; cargo was then transferred onto a stagecoach, which traveled in a straight line between Albany and the Mohawk, which was first an Indian trading path and then the old Dutch road. There, in a town called Schenectady, west of the falls, the stages reloaded their cargo onto ships and set out on the journey further west. This stagecoach run evolved into the first steam-engine route in NY, and was not far behind the first railroad line in America.

After the canal was completed in 1825, cargo could mostly stay on the water, though it still had to be loaded onto smaller boats, called packet boats, which could fit in the canal. Also, the canal could not operate during the winter months due to ice. Of course, trains and trucks surpassed canals as the main means of transporting people and goods, the surging growth of the country was less dependent on this corridor and Western New York began to decline.

It wasn’t before a number of new cities rose up in the area because of the energy and activities of the canal. These cities were, more often than not, named after places from the classical era (Rome, Ithaca, Troy, etc.), the idea being that reason, mathematics, and engineering would solve the problems of building, moving, and powering a massive number of things in the new world.

Shortly after the canal was built, the first technical college in America, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), was founded in Troy, NY. Troy is home to one of the first locks on the canal — locks are the mechanisms with gates and pumps that raise and lower boats (remember the falls!). RPI looks down from a hill onto Broadway, where my house is, and from where I write this postcard today.