E10 Cranesville

At Cranesville the machinery does something most dams never do: it disappears each winter. Lock E10, opened with the Barge Canal in the 1910s and lifting boats 15 feet at mile 35, is paired with one of the Mohawk’s signature movable “bridge dams” — steel gates suspended from an overhead span that lower every spring to pool the river deep enough to float a barge, then rise every autumn so the Mohawk’s notorious ice jams and spring floods roar through unobstructed. It is a design born of hard local experience; the March 1913 flood that wrecked dams up and down the valley was exactly the kind of violence they were built to survive. There is no separate “canal” here to protect — the river is the canal, tamed for a season and turned loose for the rest.