Baldwinsville

The village that dug its own canal — twice ahead of the state

Baldwinsville is one of the few places on the Erie where the canal story begins before the Erie Canal does. The village owes its existence to a shallow, stubborn stretch of the Seneca River, a run of rapids and rifts where boats could not pass and the earliest travelers had to climb out and drag their loads over the rocks. John and Lydia McHarrie, the first permanent settlers, landed on the south shore around 1794 and made part of their living helping others portage the rifts. It was the kind of natural bottleneck that, everywhere along this waterway, eventually summoned an engineer.

Here the engineer was a doctor. Jonas Baldwin arrived in 1798, left, and returned in 1808 with a larger idea than medicine. By the close of 1809 he had thrown a dam across the Seneca, built a bridge, and cut a private canal roughly half a mile long — with a single wooden lock — to lift boats past the rapids the settlers had been portaging by hand. Read that date again. This was 1809: a full decade before New York turned its first ceremonial shovel of the Erie Canal at Rome on the Fourth of July, 1817. One man with a dam, a channel, and one wooden lock had already done in miniature what the state was still years from attempting on a grand scale. The community that grew up around his works took his name, and Baldwinsville has carried it ever since.

A century later, the village earned a second distinction — and it is a strange and wonderful one. When New York rebuilt its nineteenth-century canal into the machine-age New York State Barge Canal, the reconstruction moved the waterway into the rivers themselves, and here that meant canalizing the very Seneca River that Dr. Baldwin had first dammed. The new masonry lock at Baldwinsville, Lock E24, was finished ahead of its neighbors, and so on May 9, 1910, it became the first lock on the entire Barge Canal system to open — the first chamber, anywhere on the rebuilt canal, to actually pass a boat.

It opened, memorably, unfinished. The gate-operating machinery had not yet been installed — the electrical equipment would not even be delivered until 1911 — so when a state contractor’s dredge and its string of scows came to lock through, the crews improvised with what the century before them would have recognized. As the state engineer’s own Barge Canal Bulletin recorded it, the gates were swung by block and tackle and horse-power, and the valves were raised by hand-worked chain hoists. A horse, in other words, opened the first lock of New York’s great electric canal. An observer on the wall that day judged that the parts “worked somewhat stiffly, but the lock chamber filled smoothly” — a modest verdict for a genuinely historic passage.

Stand at the lock today and the two eras fold neatly together. The modern Erie runs straight through the heart of downtown Baldwinsville on the canalized Seneca River, and set in the channel beside Lock E24 is Paper Mill Island, an old industrial islet reborn as a riverside amphitheater. On a summer night, boaters tie up along the wall and watch a concert from the water — music drifting across the same rapids that once forced travelers ashore, in the same river a country doctor decided, more than two hundred years ago, that he could improve.

Curious which canal you’re actually looking at when you visit? See Which canal is this? for how the 1825 ditch, the enlarged canal, and today’s Barge Canal stack up along the same route.