Rome

The mile of mud that decided a continent

For most of its length the Erie Canal was an act of engineering. At Rome it was an act of erasure. The whole enormous project — 360 miles of ditch, aqueduct, and lock — existed to destroy a single stubborn stretch of ground that had shaped North American history for a century before a shovel ever touched it: the Oneida Carry.

Look at the map the way a fur trader or a soldier once did. Everything east of here drains toward the Atlantic by way of the Mohawk River. Everything west drains toward the Great Lakes by way of Wood Creek, Oneida Lake, and the Oswego. Between the two lay a gap — one to six miles of low, wet ground, depending on the season and the mud — where a boat had to come out of the water and be dragged overland. This was the Oneida Carry, the “Great Carrying Place,” and it was the hinge of the continent. Whoever controlled that portage controlled the water route from the seaboard to the interior. It was worth an army.

So an army came. In 1758, during the French and Indian War, the British built Fort Stanwix here to guard the carry — construction directed by General John Stanwix and begun that August, finished around 1762. Two decades later it earned the nickname the National Park Service still uses. On August 2, 1777, a British force under General Barry St. Leger — regulars, German troops, Loyalists, Canadians, and Native allies — laid siege to the fort as part of the grand campaign meant to split the rebelling colonies. Inside, Colonel Peter Gansevoort’s garrison refused to yield. They held through weeks of bombardment while a relief force marched; St. Leger, hearing the relief columns approach, finally broke off and withdrew to Canada. Fort Stanwix had not surrendered — it never would — and its stubbornness helped unravel the whole British plan that ended, that autumn, in the surrender at Saratoga. The fort in downtown Rome today is a reconstruction, but the ground it stands on is the real thing.

Sixty years after the siege, a different kind of assault came to the same mile of ground — not to hold the divide, but to abolish it. On July 4, 1817, the state of New York turned the first earth of the Erie Canal at Rome, and it chose the spot deliberately: to begin where the land itself demanded to be bridged. By tradition the citizens gathered outside the village at dawn. Cannon from the U.S. Arsenal at 514 West Dominick Street sounded across the fields; the local judge Joshua Hathaway gave the opening remarks and Canal Commissioner Samuel Young addressed the crowd, and — by the old accounts — the first actual spadeful was turned by the contractor John Richardson. It is a modest scene for so large a beginning: a summer morning, a few officials, a spadeful of dirt on the exact watershed the canal was invented to conquer. The groundbreaking site, near 530 Henry Street, is industrial ground now; Rome calls itself, with justice, the Birthplace of the Erie Canal.

They started here for a practical reason, too. This flat middle section — the future summit level, where the canal crests the divide between the Mohawk and Wood Creek watersheds — was the easiest digging on the whole route, level ground with no rock gorge or escarpment to fight. Crews could learn their trade on it. The first fifteen miles, Rome to Utica, opened in 1819; the completed canal, in 1825. And here is the quiet irony a boater should carry through town: the water you travel today is not the hand-dug ditch of 1817. The modern Erie at Rome belongs to the machine-age Barge Canal of 1918, which pulled the waterway back into the Mohawk River itself — so that a boat now floats, more or less, on the very river the Oneida Carry once forced everyone to leave. The canal did what a hundred years of soldiers and traders could not. It made the carry disappear.