E14 Canajoharie

The town’s name is older than any canal — and it describes a hole in the rock. “Canajoharie” comes from the Mohawk for “the pot that washes itself,” after the Boiling Pot, a twenty-foot-wide pothole ground into the creek bed by centuries of swirling water and stone just south of the village. Lock E14, an 8-foot lift at mile 61, delivers boats to this improbably storied little place: home of the Beech-Nut packing empire, whose president Bartlett Arkell stocked the local museum that now bears his name with Winslow Homers and a Gilbert Stuart. The lock is a river lock, holding the Mohawk behind one of the valley’s movable bridge dams, with a free town wall and floating docks just east of the chamber — an easy walk into a downtown that punches far above its size.