Geography is Destiny

Looking back on the routes Julie, Ben, and I have been taking, you might say that they were determined thousands of years ago by their physical geography. During the beginning of our trip, Julie and I traveled through the Mohawk Valley of New York, which separates the Adirondack and Catskill mountain ranges. The valley was created by an enormous amount of rushing water that melted from retreating glaciers after the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. At the bottom of the valley now lies the Mohawk River. The Mohawk, named after the Native American tribe, has always been an important transportation route because it very nearly connected east coast to the interior of the country by way of the Great Lakes. That ‘very nearly’ part vexed a lot of our founding fathers, including George Washington, who was one of many who spoke of the need to build a canal to extend the Mohawk to Lake Erie. Nevertheless, Thomas Jefferson passed on federally funding the project in 1800.

What became known as the Erie Canal was eventually built in 1825, after 8 years of work by Irish laborers. New York Governor Dewitt Clinton used 7 million dollars of state funding to pay for it. Goods could now be shipped from New York via the Hudson to Albany, where they would make a 90-degree left turn into the mouth of the Mohawk and head west. The canal is what made NYC so wealthy and became the reason New York is called the Empire State, the original gateway to the rest of the country. There was one problem though– Cohoes Falls on the Mohawk slowed the fully water-borne passage. The problem had been surmounted with a series of locks along the canal. However, some passengers did not want to wait while their cargo made its way through the locks. Therefore, in the early years of the canal, a stage coach was set up between Albany and Schenectady for travelers who were content with letting their luggage catch up with them later.

That stage line eventually gave way to the Albany-Schenectady railroad in 1831, the first railroad in New York. The line ran through the Pine Bush area, a unique habitat with a large density of pine trees. In fact, the word ‘Schenectady’ is derived from the Mohawk phrase schau-naugh-ta-da, which means ‘across the pine plains’ (and is the setting for the Ryan Gosling movie Place beyond the Pines). The soil in this 19-mile stretch is sandy, sediment left from the glaciers that carved out the Mohawk Valley. Before the glacier water receded, there was a lake here, called Lake Albany by geologists. That flatness of the old lake bed made it ideal for the rail line. Eventually, the rail line also went away, making way for the age of the automobile. A road called Central Avenue took its place. I tell you all this because I live about a mile from Central Avenue, midway between Albany and Schenectady in what is now known as the Town of Colonie. Central Avenue might now seem like a placeless and nondescript commercial corridor, but if you look into its history, it played a key role in the development of the United States.

As far as Ben’s route, I’ll have much to say about that in my next post. Spoiler alert: I spent part of my childhood in Pittsburgh.