Erie Canal Boat Completes Bicentennial Voyage at Pier 26
Saturday, October 25, will mark an auspicious anniversary: the 1825 arrival in local waters of the Seneca Chief, the first boat to traverse the 500-mile length of the then-new Erie Canal. Around 4:30pm, a new Seneca Chief will dock at Pier 26 – a scrupulously authentic replica of the vessel that carried Governor DeWitt Clinton, who had championed the project 200 years ago. Governor Kathy Hochul will be on hand tomorrow to welcome the unusual boat.
When the Erie Canal opened in October 1825, it had a galvanic effect on New York State’s economy, with toll revenue paying off in one year the bond debt accrued during eight years of construction. The reasons for its success came down to arithmetic and physics: a typical mule can haul little more than 200 pounds for a few miles, but the same beast of burden, walking along a canal towpath, can pull a barge loaded with 300 tons of freight for hours on end, day after day. This meant that the Erie Canal – which cut through mountain ranges and over river gorges that were otherwise impassable – slashed the price of moving cargo from inland agricultural areas to New York’s bustling port (and the global markets it served) by more than 90 percent. Traffic peaked at more than 30,000 annual barge loads of freight in the mid-1850s.
During this contemporary voyage, the Seneca Chief has stopped to acknowledge the impact of the Erie Canal on the Haudenosaunee, a confederation of Native American tribes that was devastated by the coming of the canal infrastructure, which seized much of their ancestral land.
“This voyage is about more than retracing history,” explained Brian Trzeciak, executive director of the Buffalo Maritime Center, (the upstate museum that commissioned and built the new Seneca Chief). “It’s about reexamining it. The Erie Canal was a powerful force for change, but that change came at a cost. As we honor the 200th anniversary of its opening, we’re committed to telling a more holistic story – one that commemorates the remarkable achievement of the canal’s creation, but also acknowledges its environmental and cultural impact.
At each of their 28 stops, the crew of the Seneca Chief has planted an Eastern White Pine, revered as the Great Tree of Peace in Haudenosaunee culture. In a contemporary reenactment of the 1825 “Wedding of the Waters” ceremony (in which Governor Clinton brought a barrel of water from Lake Erie, which he symbolically poured into the Hudson River), an elixir of waters collected at each stop on the Seneca Chief’s recent passage will be used to water the final Eastern White Pine, which will be planted in Lower Manhattan.
The Erie Canal’s primacy was short-lived. Less than decade after its opening, railroads (more expensive, but much faster) began to chip away at the canal’s dominance. In the years after World War Two, the proliferation of highways and the trucking industry they enabled sank both the railroads and the canal system that steel tracks had largely supplanted. And in 1959, the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway gave oceangoing freighters a direct connection between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean, effectively making the Erie Canal obsolete. Although a trickle of freight traffic still moves along what was once derided as “Clinton’s Folly” (where barges can still move a ton of cargo more than 500 miles on one gallon of diesel – better than double the cost-efficiency of trains, and almost ten times that of trucks), it is today used mostly for recreational boating.
Starting in October 2020, the Buffalo Maritime Center (which is also a collective woodworking and handcrafts center, with a focus on traditional boatbuilding methods) recruited some 200 volunteers and students to help fabricate the new vessel. The new Seneca Chief began its 33-day commemorative journey down the Erie Canal last month.
Dr. John Montague, president emeritus of the Buffalo Maritime Center, said, “replicating a historical vessel is difficult under any circumstances, but the task is especially challenging when the boat predates photography, and neither plans nor physical remains of the actual boat survive. In order to design and build a reasonably authentic Erie Canal boat of the 1825 period, we had to deploy a wide range of research techniques. We relentlessly dug through official documents, examined, analyzed, and interpreted hundreds of drawings, paintings, illustrations, and prints. We also reviewed stories of canal travelers, searched hundreds of local newspapers of the period, and examined other boats of similar design. The result was a credible, historically accurate set of plans from which we could start construction.”
The Seneca Chief will be open briefly after its 4:30pm arrival at Pier 26 on October 25, with a welcome ceremony at 5pm. On Sunday, October 26, the Seneca Chief will be open to the public from 11am to 4pm. Visitors to the Seneca Chief may browse a companion exhibit, “Enterprising Waters: New York’s Erie Canal” onboard the Lilac, America’s only surviving steam-powered lighthouse tender at nearby Pier 25, from 2pm to 6pm.