E3 Waterford
Waterford · Mile 1.09 · Operated by NYS Canal Corporation
Barge Canal · 1918 — the Waterford Flight, lifting boats from the Hudson tidewater up to the canalized Mohawk River. Not the hand-dug canal of 1825. Which canal is this? →
History
Second in the Waterford Flight, Lock E3 makes the tallest single step in the staircase — a lift of 34.5 feet, among the highest anywhere on the Erie Canal. Like its four siblings it is a Barge Canal lock, opened in 1915 to carry boats up the Mohawk valley wall past the falls at Cohoes. From the chamber you can look straight up the flight to E4 and E5 waiting above, and back down to E2 and the harbor below: five locks in a mile and a half, doing together what a single lock never could. There is no gentle way up this wall of the valley. The Flight simply takes it in five hard steps.