E21 New London

West of Rome, everything changes direction. Rome sits astride the canal’s summit — the old “Great Carrying Place,” the portage between the Mohawk and Wood Creek that the Erie Canal was invented to erase, and the spot where the first shovel of earth turned on July 4, 1817. Past that high ground, boats stop climbing and begin to fall, and Lock E21 is where the descent toward Oneida Lake begins: a 25-foot drop, one of the steepest steps west of the Mohawk. Officially it’s the New London Lock — one of two locks by that name — roughly nine miles from a downtown Rome that has no dock of its own. From here the water runs downhill for the first time since Waterford, the canal shedding the elevation it spent more than a hundred miles gaining.