Illinois' I&M Canal's 175th Anniversary-- Part 1

From the April 8, 2023, Northwest Herald "Experience I&M Canal's 

Of course, people have heard of the Erie Canal, the Suez Canal and Panama Canal, but fewer are familiar with this one.

At the end of April, I wrote about Illinois Governor JB Pritzker declaring April as the official month of the I&M (Illinois & Michigan).

Here are some things you might want to check out in regards to this important canal, which connected the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River via the Illinois River.

Ottawa, Illinois, has a remarkable I&M Canal structure in the form of an original tollhouse which has many recovered items and fascinating displays about the waterway' storied history in a compact one-room footprint.

Located in the heart of Ottawa's downtown, right along the I&M towpath, you'll find the immacilate-looking, 175-year-old structure that a group of dedicated volunteers turned the husk of a building into a paonstakenly researched approximation of what the canal collector's tollhouse would have looked like back in 1848.

--Cooter

Seneca Falls, New York and 'It's a Wonderful Life'

From Wikipedia.

Seneca Falls is reportedly the inspiration for the fictional city of Bedford Falls in the movie "It's a Wonderful Life."

The census of 2010 put the population at 9,040.

The town is on the northern part of the Finger Lakes District.

At the conclusion of the American Revolution, this area was part of the Central New York Military Tract of some 2 million acres of land set aside to  compensate New York soldiers for serving in the war.  The land would be given to the soldiers in lots of 600 acres in size.  This caused a lot of growth in the area's population.

In 1818, a canal was completed connecting  Seneca Lake and Cayuga Lake an d these were later connected to the Erie Canal in 1828.

The Seneca Falls Convention was held there July 19-20, 1848, and was the first women's rights convention organized by women explicitly to discuss the subject.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton was involved with this.

--Cooter

200 Years Ago, the Erie Canal-- Part 7: "Buffalo Gals Won't You Come Out Tonight"

**  As the Erie Canal's original Lake Erie terminus, Buffalo became America's eighth largest city.  To emphasize that heyday heritage, Buffalo has excavated and revived its largely abandoned canal bed as Canalside, an urban park and recreational  development where you can catch a concert or rent kayaks.

In Victorian times, the Canalside was where crews of east-bound Midwest grain freighters were paid -- and where their wages were squandered on booze and floozies.

Larry Mruk, who leads walking tours for Explore Buffalo said this is the spot that inspired the folk song "Buffalo Gals"  They were the painted ladies who would come out at night and dance by the light of the moon.

What was the song George Bailey and Mary Hatch had in "It's A Wonderful Life?"

Well...  Something I Definitely Did Not Know About That a Song.  --Cooter

200 Years Ago, the Erie Canal-- Part 6: Locks and Wurlitzer

**  The Rochester Museum and Science Center has a hands-on model of a lock, while the town of Lockport is where seven locks initially raised and lower canal boats 167 feet, the same distance as the natural plunge at the nearby Niagara Falls.

Today, there are just two locks at Lockport.

You can take a narrated boat trip here with Lockport Locks & Erie Canal Cruises.

**  North Tonawanda, the canal's western terminus since the 1917-1918 enlargement of the waterway, is where the canal feeds into the Niagara River.  A beautifully developed canalside docking area is located in the spruced-up downtown, once home to factories for Wurlitzer organs and Herschell carousels.

--CootCanal

200 Years Ago, the Erie Canal-- Part 5: A "Wizard of Oz" Connection

**  The City of Little Falls had the foresight to keep its old canal warehouses intact.  Today they house boutiques in what's called Canal Place.

**  At tiny Chittenango, once a hub of canal-boat building and repair, the Chittenango Landing Canal Boat Museum features a replica canal boat.  "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" author Frank Baum was born in Chittenango in 1856 and the village has various Oz-inspired touches, including the Yellow Brick Road Casino.

**  In downtown Syracuse, where the original canal flowed, you can see dozens of artifacts and look around a canal boat replica at the Erie Canal Museum in the old Weighlock Building, where tolls were assessed by poundage.

I wonder if there are any original canal boats remaining?

--CootBoat

200 Years Later, the Erie Canal-- Part 4: Places to Go on the Erie Canal

Some places to see on the Erie Canal:

**  Historic downtown Waterford, which pushes it status as the eastern end of the original Erie Canal.  (The canal's eastern terminus is now less than a half-mile sout on the deeper Mohawk River channel.)  Pleasure craft can dock at the town's landing and the city is dotted with painted, life-size fiberglass mules as a public art project.  Mules, of course, were the main source of power for the 1800s canal boats.

There are hiking trails, exhibits, scenic overlooks.  Learn about the canal's histort at Waterford Historical Museum.

**  At Fort Hunter, west of Schenectady, there is the Schoharie Crossing State Historic Site where yoy can see the remains of an aqueduct created for the early 1800s canal.  The picturesque town of Amsterdam is nearby on the Mohawk River.

--Cooter

200 Years Later, the Erie Canal-- Part 3: 4.5 MPH on the Erie Canal

Portions of the Erie Canal were widened (originally 40-feet-wide) and deepened before the Civil War and expanded again a century ago.  Some parts are essentially weed troughs and narrow.

Many towns that once depended on shipping along the canal, now push tourism with inns and eateries catering to recreational boaters and visitors who hike and bike along paved trails running alongside the corridor.

The Donnellys have a blog (serenitysstory.blog)  and say they are moving along at a 4.5 mile-an-hour pace, just a little faster than back in the day when mules pulled boats of people and products back in the 1830s.

Donnelly Great Loop Adventure 2017.  Appears they are up around Mackinac and preparing to go down Lake Michigan.

--Cooter

200 Years Later, the Erie Canal-- Part 2: 35 Locks To Your Destination

Recreational boats traveling the full length of the Erie Canal are lifted or lowered through 35 elevation locks and can dock at towns built alongside the canal.

The labor intensive construction (remember this is before the machine age) was completed in 1825 and the canal enabled settlers to sail west while grain and agricultural products moved east.  The boats were slender, shallow-draft wooden vessels.  It transformed New York City into America's largest port and turned outposts like Cleveland and Chicago into mercantile hubs.

Construction of the Erie Canal was essentially a learn-as-you-go engineering technology and advances made on this helped the later (and bigger) Suez and Panama canals.

You can drive alongside much of the 338-mile canal and the state of New York has issued driving and bicycling maps and brochures for the Erie Canal's bicentennial.  Instead of taking the 4 1/2 hour zip along the I-90 tollway, you can enjoy a leisurely trip along the old canal.

And Sing "Low Bridge, Everybody Down, Cause We're Coming to a Town."  --Cooter

200 Years Later, the Erie Canal-- Part 1 Used More for Pleasure Craft Now

From the July 23, 2017, Chicago Tribune "200 years later" by John Borden.

Last week, I wrote about the man who took the Erie Canal out to the Great Lakes in 1836.

The Erie Canal altered the face of commerce in the United States, but now traffics in tourists.

The Donnelly family of Annapolis sold or stored everything they owned and bought a 36-foot catamaran and intend to take it through the Erie Canal to the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi, along the Gulf Coast and up the Eastern Seaboard back home.  Quite a trip.  The Donnellys, like many people, are using the Erie Canal for pleasure, not business , which is a big change from when the canal opened and business was its aim.

The Erie Canal connected the Hudson River with the Great Lakes.  Construction of it began 200 years ago this month.

It has since been surpassed by railroads and the New York State Thruway, both of which follow along the canal's path.  Barges still haul freight too large to be shipped by air or land, however, but by far, it is used primarily by pleasure craft that glide through the stunning countryside.

--Cooter

One Man's Travels On the Erie Canal (and Beyond) in 1836-- Part 3: Ohio's Canals and Two Presidents

David Sprague Crandall next crossed Lake Erie by steamer, landing in Cleveland.

Ohio's recent work on their canal system allowed him to travel several more days to the Ohio River, where he traveled again by steamer which he described as, "a little squeaking stern-wheeler which was aground half the time and the passengers kept running back and forth across the boat to rock it through through the sand bars."  I take it he was not overly impressed.

It was in Cincinnati that he saw President Jackson as well as William Henry Harrison, two War of 1812 heroes.  Of course, Harrison would himself be elected to the presidency four years later.

--Cooter

One Man's Travels on the Erie Canal in 1836-- Part 2: A Baby Squall?

The canal boat David Sprague Crandall boarded was bound for Buffalo, at the western end of the canal.

"Just as we made the light of S. Pendleton Clark's grocery the ever rolling banks of Townawanda Creek bearing sou'west by south half south & a little southerly we were struck abaft of the main hatch by a squall from the cook's baby.

"The captain was equal to the emergency and immediately gave orders to club-haul the boat, take a double reef in the overboard and pray for daylight.  The squall was short, sharp and uneventful, so that we made with cheerful alacrity," Crandall recorded in his journal.

Not sure what sort of storm they encountered here.

--Cooter

One Man's Travels on the Erie Canal in 1836-- Part 1: A Journal

From the July 23, 2017, Chicago Tribune by Stephanie Reynolds.

As we mark the 200th anniversary of the beginning of construction on the famous Erie Canal, connecting the Hudson River with the Great Lakes, a huge step in American transportation and quite an undertaking without the equipment we have today, here is a look back.

It was 1836, the same year as the Battle of the Alamo in Texas, David Sprague Crandall left his hometown in Lockport, N.Y., to travel on the Erie Canal and the Ohio and Mississippi rivers all the way to Galveston, , Texas.

He took paddle-wheel steamers  and slow-poke line boats pulled by mules on a tow path.  Along the way, he encountered an alligator, a horse race that pitted Tennessee against Kentucky and President Andrew Jackson.

Fortunately for us, he kept a journal of his trip for his 9-year-old grandson, George Lee Thurston II.

Crandall was a journalist and eventually became the owner of the Lockport Courier.  But, on August 8, 1836, he boarded a "shovel-nosed line boat" that was propelled by two mules and a ragged boy."  He was in poor health and going west to seek a change of climate.

he was heading west to Buffalo, NY, at the western end of the canal, at a speed somewhat slower than a person walking.

But, at least he wasn't doing the walking.

--DaCoot

Two Canal Boats Found in Lake Ontario--- Part 2

But, then, you have to wonder what the canal boats were doing in the lake when they sank?

Two divers using deep-sea apparatus filmed the wrecks, located some 200 feet down.  The identification of the two has not happened but it is believed that the vessels were built in the mid-1800s when the Erie Canal was widened to accommodate larger boats.

Records of the more than 600 Lake Ontario shipwrecks didn't turn up a match for either one.

Jim Kennard thinks that they weer probably being towed when they sank.  Both show damage indicating their cargoes may have shifted during fast-changing weather conditions.  They were likely older boats whose owners tried to get one more voyage out of them on the lake, which is connected to the Erie Canal by the Oswego Canal.

Mystery Solved?  --Cooter

July 4th Through the Years

This date in U.S. History, besides being our 238th birthday today.

1801:  The United States Military Academy to train Army officers officially opened.

1803:  The Louisiana Purchase was announced in newspapers.  A great land deal.  France sold a huge tract of land to the U.S. for $15 million, coming out to 3 cents an acre.

1817:  Construction on the Erie Canal began in New York state.  It connected the Hudson River at Albany and Lake Erie at Buffalo.

JULY 4th was a bad day for earlier American presidents.  Three died on this date in 1826 and 1831.

1826: Presidents Thomas Jefferson (3rd) and John Adams (2nd)
1831:  James Madison (6th)

--Cooter