E19 Frankfort

By the time a westbound boat reaches Frankfort, it has been riding the Mohawk River in disguise for miles — the twentieth-century Barge Canal put traffic into the river itself rather than a ditch beside it. Lock E19 lifts boats 21 feet, one of the taller single steps in this reach, in the Herkimer County that gave the world Remington firearms and the sparkling quartz crystals collectors prize as “Herkimer diamonds.” Don’t mistake it for Clinton’s Ditch: E19 belongs to the concrete-and-steel system finished in 1918, not the hand-dug canal of 1825. Just west of here the canal finally parts from the Mohawk, striking overland on a long land cut toward Rome — but at Frankfort, the river is still doing the work a canal usually does.