Aqueducts & Culverts of the Erie Canal

Long before highways flew over rivers on concrete piers, the Erie Canal did the same trick with water. To carry boats across the valleys that cut its path, the canal’s engineers built aqueducts — bridges that carry the canal itself, a river of stone holding a river of water — and threaded countless culverts beneath the towpath to let creeks pass underneath. They are the most quietly astonishing engineering on the whole waterway.

The great aqueducts

The most celebrated survivors are the Schoharie Crossing aqueducts near Fort Hunter, where you can walk among the arches of the Enlarged Erie’s Schoharie Aqueduct — a State Historic Site that lays out all four eras of the canal in one place. Downstream, remnants of the Rexford (Upper Mohawk) Aqueduct still stand where the canal once leapt the Mohawk near Schenectady, and in Rochester the canal famously crossed the Genesee River twice — the 1823 first aqueduct and the grand 1842 stone Broad Street Aqueduct, whose arches still carry a city street over the river downtown.

These crossings were the hardest, most expensive work on the canal, and they explain why the route wanders the way it does. To understand how the 1825 “Clinton’s Ditch,” the Enlarged Erie, and the modern Barge Canal each handled these valleys differently, start with our cornerstone explainer, Which Canal Is This?

Culverts & guard gates

Where an aqueduct was too much, engineers ran the stream under the canal in a stone culvert — the best-known being the storied culvert near Medina that carries a road beneath the canal (locally famous enough to have earned its own legends). Along the way, guard gates stand ready to seal off sections of the canal for repairs or to protect against floods — another piece of the quiet machinery that keeps the whole system working.

Read more

The canal’s engineering story runs deep in our history section: how amateur engineers invented American civil engineering as they went, how the four canals rebuilt the same route three times, and the towns the crossings made. To see the aqueduct country for yourself, visit Clifton Park & Crescent (Rexford), the Amsterdam and Fort Hunter stretch (Schoharie Crossing), and Rochester (the Genesee crossing).

Aqueduct and crossing details are drawn from our sourced history features and the National Park Service / NYS Historic Sites record. Some culvert stories are local legend and are labeled as such.