Why Rome?
When New York finally committed to digging a 363-mile canal from the Hudson to Lake Erie, engineers started in the middle — at Rome, on July 4, 1817.4 The stretch west of Rome was flat, soft-bottomed and lock-free, the easiest miles of the whole route. The state wanted fast, visible progress to keep skeptics quiet, and it got it: the first working section, from Rome to Utica, opened to boats in October 1819.3
The full canal took eight years, dug largely by hand and horse by local laborers and immigrant crews. Critics mocked it as "Clinton's Ditch" after Governor DeWitt Clinton, the project's great champion.1 The name stopped being an insult almost immediately.
What it did to the Valley
The canal cut shipping costs by roughly 90 percent compared with hauling by wagon — and cut weeks to days.1 The Mohawk Valley towns sat on some of the busiest miles of the canal. Utica, a river-crossing village, became a boomtown and chartered as a city in 1832. Little Falls, Frankfort, Ilion, Mohawk and Herkimer all grew up as canal ports; warehouses, boatyards and taverns lined the water.
The canal was enlarged between 1836 and 1862 to handle bigger boats,2 then replaced altogether in 1918 by the Barge Canal, which moved the channel into the Mohawk River itself.2 The old ditch through the middle of the cities was filled in — which is why so much of it now hides in plain sight (see The canal under your feet).
Still open for business
The Erie Canal never actually closed. Today's Barge Canal alignment still operates seasonally for recreational boats, its locks — including the giant Lock 17 at Little Falls — working much as they did in 1918. The old towpath has a second life too: long stretches of the Erie Canalway Trail (part of the Empire State Trail) follow it across the Valley,7 and the Old Erie Canal State Historic Park preserves a 36-mile stretch of the enlarged canal between DeWitt and Rome.6
