There’s a lot of time to ponder the past and future of the Erie Canal as the Seneca Chief crawls its way through the channels and locks of the 200-year-old marvel.
That’s on purpose, said Brian Trzeciak, executive director of the Buffalo Maritime Center. He’s leading the 33-day expedition aboard a replica of the vessel used by New York Gov. DeWitt Clinton when he opened the canal in 1825. The boat and its crew are retracing the 363-mile waterway connecting Buffalo and Albany, then turning down the Hudson River and arriving in New York City on Saturday.
The Seneca Chief moves at 19th-century speed — it chugged along at about 6 knots. It took about five hours to travel the roughly 18 miles between Amsterdam and Schenectady. Canoers kept pace. Trucks, bicycles and a freight train passed by.
“The Erie Canal is not going anywhere,” Trzeciak said. “There are problems within invasive species. There's problems with the environment. There's people who want to just live in that past and just keep on lifting it up. But what we want to do is have these conversations, and that's what this boat is trying to do.”
Along the way, history buffs are discussing how to honor the canal’s significance as the first waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. Should the canal be celebrated as an engineering marvel that seeded commerce and industry across New York state? Or should the focus be on the westward expansion that it sparked and the indigenous people who were subsequently displaced?
They’re also wondering how the canal can best be used over the next 100 years, now that better shipping options are available. Is the waterway still a commercially viable shipping option? Or should its future lean on tourism and recreation?
Trzeciak is one of about a dozen people who have been living on the 73-foot boat during the trip. It’s not a perfect replica — there are modern lights and safety equipment, but still no toilet.
Instead of horses or mules that pulled boats in the 19th century, the Seneca Chief is yoked to a diesel tugboat that pushes it along. It’s part vessel, part quarters and part floating museum, according to Eddie Knibloe, who helped curate its contents.
“As a kid, I always dreamed of living in a museum exhibit,” Knibloe said. “To fall asleep reading a book in like a nice paneled room on a rope bed … you can't live exactly like it's 1825, but you can get little glimpses at what that world would've been like.”
New York spends around $140 million a year to operate its canal system. In addition to the Erie Canal, there are spurs north to Lake Ontario as well as to Lake Champlain. More than 73,000 vessels moved through the system’s 57 locks last year. Most of them were recreational boats — a far cry from the “packet” barges that hauled flour, lumber and other wares during the system’s heyday.
The Canal Corp. is a subsidiary of the New York Power Authority, which effectively subsidizes the system’s operations. Director Brian Stratton said it remains a worthwhile investment.
“It still does what it was intended to do. In recent weeks we've had major, major commercial shipments going,” Stratton said, noting a quarry regularly sends barges of stone. A dozen large beer tanks were sent to a Rochester brewery in 2017.
The boat has become something of a floating spectacle. Canoers and kayakers kept pace as it wended through locks and past farms. Jim Amell grew up in Scotia and paddled along for several miles.
“Back in the ‘70s, we kind of thought of the river as more of a sewer than a resource,” he said. “That's changed. Now it's great for recreation, great for fishing, and honoring the history is really cool.”
Pat Roslund recalled meeting a civil engineer decades ago who was infatuated with the canal’s structures.
“I went on one of our first dates taking pictures of the locks,” Roslund recalled. She married him anyway.
Doreen Ditoro grew up in Waterford, where the modern canal flows into the Hudson River. She would walk along the old towpath to a job at McDonald’s and as a girl would stand over the locks as the water rushed in.
“It was one of the first songs we learned in St. Mary's School,” she said. “I got a mule and the name is Sal — 15 miles on the Erie Canal.”
Indeed, villages and cities crop up at that interval along the canal — marking the rough distance a team of animals could pull a packet over the course of a day. Many of the cities are long past their prime. Syracuse has a square celebrating the waterway.
Buffalo in the last decade developed the Canalside park along its waterfront at the old Lake Erie terminus. The Buffalo Maritime Center is a few miles north. Volunteers built the boat over the course of several years, and M&T Bank — which was founded in Buffalo as it boomed with canal-related trade — provided funding for the journey.
In Schenectady, the old canal route is now Erie Boulevard, and boats use the adjacent Mohawk River. A brass ensemble played as the Seneca Chief steered past a casino and a small nuclear reactor to get to the city’s new harbor.
“The canal quite literally connected us to the world, fueled our growth and turned us into the community we are today,” Schenectady County Legislature Chair Gary Hughes said during a ceremony.
Roslund and hundreds of other people lined up for a chance to tour the boat, which was quickly converted into an exhibit with displays about DeWitt Clinton’s gubernatorial tenure and boat-making techniques used by Haudenosaunee Indians.
In 1825, the governor triumphantly poured a keg of water from Lake Erie into New York Harbor. On this voyage, the crew is drawing water from each of its 28 stops to pour into a wooden keg. The water will be poured onto a white pine sapling — a Haudenosaunee symbol of peace — that’s planted in New York City.
“It's a huge opportunity to broaden that narrative of the Erie Canal,” said Trzeciak. “The barrel of water from all across New York state is a symbolic gesture to the future, a symbolic gesture to what can happen when people get together.”
