E28A Lyons

A little over a mile past its sibling, Lock E28A makes the steepest single step in the Lyons–Newark stretch — a 19.5-foot lift at mile 222, half again as tall as the locks on either side. It is a Barge Canal lock of the early twentieth century, part of the machine-age rebuild that traded DeWitt Clinton’s four-foot ditch for a channel deep enough to float real freight. Local hobbyist lore hangs the nickname “the Poor House” on this chamber, but the name surfaces only in an amateur gazetteer, so treat it as folklore rather than fact. What is solid is the geography: here the canal runs as a dug land cut through Wayne County farmland, the canalized-river country of the Mohawk Valley left well behind to the east.