The Erie Canal Village, Rome, NY, Part 2

You can read about Part 1 here. After wandering around the historic houses and marveling over the advances in modern technology (like, uh, washing machines and light bulbs!), we made our way over the the Cheese Factory Museum. I have to admit, I know very little about the history of cheesemaking. I don’t even eat cheese very often!

The cheese industry in New York was the top in the nation for a while, even surpassing Wisconsin. Cheese was an important meat substitute for the diets of early Americans. Livestock was not eaten nearly as frequently as it is now.

The kids had a lot of fun exploring the various hands-on displays.

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The Erie Canal Packet Boat Ride, Rome, NY

On July 4, the kids and I went to Rome, NY, to the Erie Canal Village. I’ve blogged about our day there, Part 1 and Part 2. What an adventure it was! One of the best parts was riding the horse-drawn packet boat down the sliver of the old Erie Canal. Here’s a video I made of the idyllic experience. If it wasn’t for the power lines in the meadows and the sounds of traffic on the roads, you’d think you were transported back to 1830 or so, at the height of the Canal’s popularity. The ride was so peaceful and the scenery so beautiful, I wish it would never stop.

You’d never know it today, but before the Erie Canal, traveling west from the eastern seaboard of the United States was almost impossible. The Adirondacks to the North all the way to Canada barred the northern pass, and the Appalachians from Canada down to the Carolinas were impassable until the airplane was invented. The only way west was through Central New York, and that was by oxen-driven carts or wagons.

I wrote a post about the uniqueness of the Mohawk Valley geography and the transportation boom here.

The Erie Canal was the brainchild of decades of inspiration and planning by some of our newly independent and ambitious American forefathers. When the plan was finalized in 1817 and the first shovelful of dirt removed (in Rome, where the Erie Canal Village is located), some scoffed and said it could never be done. President Thomas Jefferson said it was “little short of madness to think of it!” New York State is rugged country– millions of tons of soil and solid rock had to be removed; millions of gallons of water from swamps and rivers had to be reorganized and displaced. Where the Canal had to cross over bridges, aqueducts were created and the waters of the Canal elevated; where mountains stood in its way, dynamite blasted the New York bedrock into movable pieces. This was before bulldozers and cranes. Thousands of men lost their lives to accidents, disease, and exhaustion.

When finally completed on October 26, 1825, it was the engineering marvel of its day. It included 18 aqueducts to carry the canal over ravines and rivers, and 83 locks, with a rise of 568 feet from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. It was 4 feet deep and 40 feet wide, and floated boats carrying 30 tons of freight. A ten foot wide towpath was built along the bank of the canal for horses, mules, and oxen led by a boy boat driver or “hoggee”. The Erie Canal.org

New York State is not flat land– it’s very mountainous. Our highest point is Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks, at 5,344 ft, and we have all mountains and hills in between. If the Erie Canal was to be built straight across the state, all the waters of Lake Ontario would soon drain into the Atlantic Ocean, like a waterfall, lol! Thus, the “canal lock” was created. There’s a good explanation about how the locks work here. I found this cute animated icon that helps.

Some called the Erie Canal the Eighth Wonder of the World. Many had said it couldn’t be done. The completion of the Canal and the burst of business it brought catapulted New York State into fame and riches, earning its nickname, “The Empire State.” All the wealth of the Westward Expansion passed over New York State soil. Before the Erie Canal, New Orleans was the nation’s biggest harbor; after the Erie Canal, Upstate New York thrust New York City into the limelight, and its harbor became one of the largest in the world.

Today, most of the old Canal is in ruins. Some has been preserved for tourist attractions, like the Erie Canal Village in Rome. Some has been modified for recreational boating uses. The canal was rerouted for heavy cargo passage and renamed The New York State Barge Canal, but interest in the Canal waned because of faster methods, like railroad, and then trucks. Interestingly, because of high gasoline prices, transporting of goods by the canal is seeing renewed interest.

We’ve been to a few museums dedicated to the Erie Canal. You can read about them here:

The Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse Part One
The Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse Part Two
The Erie Canal Town Museum in Canastota

The Erie Canal Town Museum, Canastota, NY

We’d heard about the Erie Canal Town Museum in Canastota, NY, and late last summer, we decided to give it a try! Boy, we were not disappointed! What a wonderful museum, and what a great tour guide we had.

The drive was very pleasant to Canastota along Route 5. There are numerous little communities strung like pearls down this old “Seneca Turnpike,” as Route 5 was once called. Beautiful, grand old houses, neat yards, sidewalks, trees lining the streets, small shops… this vista of small-town America was such a refreshing sight for a person weary of the cluttered, ugly mill towns and endless political bickering of greater Utica. Canastota is a town in its own right, and it is obvious that the residents have made it a community. Truly a lovely village.

The Canal Town Museum was not difficult to find, although the building is a tiny-looking little thing.

We were the only ones at the Museum. I like that, because we usually get first-class treatment! The curator of this Museum, Mr. Joe DiGiorgio, went out of his way to make our visit one we will never forget. Usually, visitors are self-guided through the Museum’s displays, but Mr. DiGiorgio took on the role of tour guide; and he was so absorbed in his role that he unwittingly kept the Museum open an extra hour! Read more

Cherry Valley Gorge and Judds Falls

I used to live in Cherry Valley. Come to think of it, I think I’ve lived in every little bitty Upstate town. Oh, I am exaggerating. A little. Last year about this time, the family took a drive out to Cherry Valley to see the Judds Falls.

Cherry Valley is a tiny little place and one of those uber-rural Upstate New York towns very much “out of the way” from the main thoroughfare. It wasn’t always such an isolated settlement. In the days before motorcars and railroads, Cherry Valley was the natural passageway between the western and eastern sections of New York State. A Landmark Village says of it:

Cherry Valley was a gateway to the American Frontier. The reason was this: there is a ridge of mountains and hills that run east to west, separating the Mohawk from the Susquehanna watersheds. But there are smooth fertile glacial valleys both north and south of this ridge at Cherry Valley. The ancient Iroquois discovered that these glacial valleys formed a natural stairway, giving them their easiest way through the ridge. Cherry Valley was also quite near to the Mohawk River itself, which veers sharply south into Canajoharie.

The result was that Cherry Valley was an important link between the Mohawk and the other Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. Cherry Valley’s favored position along the ridge made it part of the natural route east to west as well.

Cherry Valley was the location of the Cherry Valley Massacre during the American Revolution. Have you ever seen the Mel Gibson movie, “The Patriot”? A great deal of the movie’s plot comes from various little events that actually occurred during the American Revolution. In the movie, Mel Gibson’s character speaks of a massacre of innocent women and children at a fort (called Fort Wilderness in the movie). Gibson and his men take revenge on the Indians and French perpetrators. During the American Revolution, there were several massacres, but the most famous one was probably the Cherry Valley Massacre.

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New York’s Mohawk Valley

We actually saw SUNSHINE yesterday (the Mohawk Valley of Upstate New York sees sunshine about 1/3 of the year). Almost all our surface snow had melted, although the big dirty clumps of snow remain. It was actually rather pleasant, despite the mud! Today, the temperatures are back down below freezing and misty snow is falling. A few inches are expected today.

Can I whine? Waaaaaaaaah!

The Mohawk Valley is a unique area of Upstate. It is the lowest geographic area of the state. Therefore, it is the cloudiest area of the state. We aren’t hit as hard with lake effect snow (snowstorms that travel from Lake Ontario to our west), but we do experience flooding.

The Mohawk Valley used to be called the Gateway to the West because it was the only navigable route to the western frontier of the United States, until the railroads were built in the late 1800s. If you look at a map of the Eastern seaboard, we’ve got the Appalachian Mountains from the Carolinas up to the Pennsylvania/New York State border, and we’ve got the Adirondacks and “Northern Appalachians” northward up to Canada.

The only area where people could transport their goods and their families west was up the Hudson River and westward through the Mohawk Valley. It is the reason why New York State is such the “melting pot” state that it is. The centuries of transmigration through our state has formed its character. We are an impatient, transient, restless people. There’s a terrific online book by the late Paul Keesler, called Valley of the Crystals; if you want to learn more about New York, that’s a great place to start.

It is believed that the first inhabitants of what is now New York were the Algonquin Indians and the Iroquois Indians (these are the European names given them). The Iroquois Indians consisted of numerous tribes; the groups that populated the Mohawk Valley were, as expected, the Mohawks. They were a very fierce and territorial tribe, so this part of New York was considered the “wild frontier” and remained largely unsettled because of the fierce clashes between the Europeans and the Mohawks.

The Revolutionary War (in which the Mohawks sided with the British– the losers) ended the Mohawk’s land claims. (During the Revolutionary War, Upstate New York was a hot bed of civil clashes between patriots and loyalists. Besides the 100+ battles fought here, there were terrorist raids by British, Loyalists, and their Indian allies. So much of the Mohawk Valley was destroyed by fire that this period is called “The Burning of the Valleys” to this day). After the war, the “wild frontier” was rapidly settled.

The construction of the Erie Canal sealed New York as the Empire State, leading an entirely new era of entrepreneurship, and spawned the Industrial Revolution in the country. And in the 1820s, a religious revival that began in Adams, NY, led by Charles Grandison Finney, spread across the state and across the nation. This eventually spawned religious revivals across the world in Wales, Scotland, and the Scandinavian countries. The Mohawk Valley became known as the “Burned Over District” because of the zeal and fervent devotion of Christians. From this revival sprang movements for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. New York State– and especially the Mohawk Valley– led the nation once again.

I did not grow up in the Mohawk Valley. I am a relatively new import, although I am a New York native. I’m actually a descendant of the Algonquin Indians, so I don’t suppose I can get any more New York native than if I sprang out of the soil. Living in the Mohawk Valley is a interesting experience. The area is very self-absorbed. I don’t mean that in a necessarily negative way. This area is very cloistered and not as cosmopolitan as, say, Syracuse or Binghamton. And there is no desire for the Mohawk Valley to become cosmopolitan; the people of the Valley seem to like their traditional ways. I suppose this is what attracts young families, as the Mohawk Valley touts itself as a wonderful place to raise a family.

In June 2006, Upstate New York was hit massively hard with flooding catastrophies. The rain just never seemed to stop. My own property has been flooded a dozen times in the past decade. I dug up this old YouTube video of a restaurant in a nearby town that was washed away in the floods. The second video is an aerial video of the flooded Mohawk River. The pictures are stunning.

New York has been experiencing another series of battles over the years, this time for the heart and soul of the state. Horrible economic and legislative policies tailored to benefit New York City at the expense of rural Upstate has caused New York to spin into a nosedive. New York is expecting to lose at least two congressional seats after the next census, due to severely declining population; New York is losing its political clout and seems to have forgotten its roots. It was actually Upstate’s Erie Canal and Finney’s Great Awakening that made New York City the hub that it is and the success that it found, but I think those facts have been forgotten. Time will tell if New York will see another awakening.

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