Surviving stone remnants of the Crescent Aqueduct that once carried the Erie Canal over the Mohawk River — Photo: Ohlhous / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)

Erie Canal Capital Region / Eastern Gateway

Crescent & Vischer Ferry

Approx. Mile 2–13 along the Erie Canal

Barge Canal · 1918 — the canalized Mohawk River between Locks E6 and E7, past preserved 1825-canal relics. Which canal is this? →

Above the Waterford Flight, the Erie Canal leaves the ladder of locks behind and settles into the wide, slow Mohawk. This section follows the river from the Crescent area near Lock E6 (around mile 2) upstream to Lock E7 and the Vischer Ferry Dam (around mile 13), threading the towns of Halfmoon and Clifton Park on the Saratoga County side and Niskayuna on the Schenectady County shore.

This is a rural-to-suburban, trail-rich stretch rather than a marina district. The Mohawk-Hudson Bike-Hike Trail — carrying the Empire State Trail along the old canal towpath — runs the length of it, and the Vischer Ferry Nature & Historic Preserve protects more than 700 acres, including an original 1825 section of the Erie Canal. It is a favorite of paddlers, cyclists, and birders, with public boat launches but few boater services.

Where the canal walked on water — and where it still holds it

Stand on the Mohawk today, between Lock E6 near Crescent and Lock E7 at Vischer Ferry, and the river looks like the whole story: a broad, canalized channel held at navigable depth behind movable dams, the Barge Canal of 1918 flowing quietly through the valley. But the most remarkable thing that ever happened here isn’t in the water — it’s in what’s missing above it. For most of the nineteenth century, the Erie Canal did not follow this stretch of river. It crossed it. High and dry, on stilts.

The device was the Crescent Aqueduct, and it was one of the great engineering set-pieces of the Enlarged Erie. When the canal was rebuilt bigger in the middle 1800s, the Mohawk here proved too wide and too willful to run alongside, so the engineers did the audacious thing canal builders did when a river got in the way: they carried the canal over it. The Crescent Aqueduct was a cut-stone span of twenty-six arches — a masonry trough riding on piers set into the riverbed, wide enough to float a loaded canal boat and its mules across the open Mohawk while the river ran, indifferent, underneath. Picture it: boats sailing across the sky above the water, a ribbon of engineered stone thrown clear across the valley.

It did not survive the machine age. When the twentieth-century Barge Canal moved navigation down into the river itself — the very water the old canal had been built to avoid — the aqueduct had no job left to do. It was demolished around 1918. And here the guidebook cliché is wrong: this is not a place where you’ll find proud stone piers marching across the current. The great span’s cut stone was largely salvaged, reused into a nearby lock breakwater, its careful masonry put back to work holding the new canal instead of carrying the old one. Only scattered remnants linger on the banks. The aqueduct didn’t so much vanish as get recycled — a good New York habit, thrift dressed as demolition.

The paradox of this section is that the towpath outlasted the aqueduct. The nineteenth-century masterpiece is mostly gone; the humble dirt path the mules walked survives beautifully. Inside the 740-acre Vischer Ferry Nature & Historic Preserve, a preserved section of the 1820s Erie Canal still holds water — not a river standing in for the canal, but the actual hand-scaled ditch, quiet and green, exactly where it was dug two centuries ago. Cross it on the 1862 Whipple truss bridge, a wrought-iron span of the kind that once carried roads over canals all across the state and now survives in only a handful of places. Walk the towpath to Clute’s Dry Dock, built in 1852, where canal boats were hauled out of the water and patched — the maintenance shop of a working waterway, still legible in the earthworks. To read the old Erie as it actually lived, this is one of the best-preserved stretches anywhere on the line.

Even the modern lock here carries an antique streak. Lock E7, the Vischer Ferry lock, ran on direct current — DC power, the older and rarer standard — fed after 1925 by the Vischer Ferry hydroelectric plant across the river. Most of the canal converted to alternating current over the years; E7 was one of the last direct-current locks on the system, an electrical fossil quietly doing its work at the edge of a nature preserve.

So this section keeps a strange kind of double-time. The engineering marvel — the aqueduct that let boats fly over a river — is a ghost, its stones repurposed into the breakwater downstream. The modest stuff — a ditch, a towpath, a truss bridge, a dry dock — is what endured. If the canal in this valley has always been more than one canal at once, the ground at Vischer Ferry is where you can still tell which is which. (Not sure which canal you’re looking at from the bank? Start here.)