Remembering the Chenango Canal

              

                The old Chenango Canal near Hamilton


Chenango American, Greene, N.Y.
August 4, 1892

    Some not very old now remember Captain Wheaton Loomis, as holding the tiller with one hand, he waved a gracious adieu with the other, as his gallant craft left the moorings at the Lewis & Gillman storehouse, in Greene, in the sunny years of our boyhood.

Chenango American
February 24, 1898

    Captain J. W. Davidson recently related some of his canal boat life. "I was 17 years old and was 23 years at the business. The fastest round trip from Greene to New York and return was in 21 days.  The latter part of one season the boat which I was captain and one third owner, was $700 in debt.
    "I made a round trip and a half and after paying the indebtedness of the boat was divided $1,700. I lost my arm at Oxford when I was 19 years old, breasting off a boat."

Chenango Semi-Weekly Telegraph

February 25, 1899

                               FROM A FORMER RESIDENT

                                        _____

Interesting Reminscences of Half a Century Passed - A Boy’s Norwich, Long Ago

                                              The Old Canal

    It is many years since I left Norwich and only at long intervals have I returned to the scenes of my youth. Since those early days I have seen a goodly share of the world. I have been in half of the United States and have crossed the ocean four times. But among all of the recollections of all these years thee is none that are more vivid or recur more frequently than those of Norwich between 1856 and 1868.

    In what follows are to be found merely boyish impressions and recollections, some of which may recall to other boys between forty and fifty-five years of age some things which they had long forgotten.

    When I was in Norwich last I gained the impression, whether it be right or wrong I do not know that the boy in Norwich today has no such chances for enjoyment as did his predecessor a generation or more ago. Everything seems to have changed except the everlasting hills and even on these there are now young forests where there were berry patches in my youth.

    These changes have many of them gave been for the better but at the same time they have restricted opportunities of the boy. For instance the canal is a thing of the past and I often wonder where the young generation takes its swim and does its skating. With the canal has gone the aqueduct or “akkerduck” as it was called that admirable place for swimming in dirty water so persistently used all summer long by the boys of a generation ago.

    No aqueduct, no mill, no dike. Swimming in Norwich must have lost two thirds of its pleasures with those features absent. In my day there were large banks of blue clay on the west side of the Canasawacta near the aqueduct and when that stream got on a rampage one spring it stripped all the soil from this clay and excavated a deep hole at the very edge of the bank. The swimming hole that season divided with the aqueduct the attention of the boys. 

    It was such fun to get the bank wet for then it was so slippery and it made an elegant slide direct into the water. Is then now any place where the more daring boys can jump from great heights as we did from the aqueduct bridge or from Guernsey’s old mill? Or has the introduction of water into town and the existence of bath tubs taken away the youthful desire to swim as we did?

    Then where do the Norwich boys go skating? I cannot imagine any place which should answer as a substitute for the “state ditch.”  What opportunities these were for fancy skating in the basin of Maydole’s factory and near the end of South Main street bridge. Here I notice another change to which I might call attention. We boys had a North Main street and a south Main street, but some poetically inclined individual has place these time honored names by Broad street.

    Thus thee are vandals in Norwich as well as in medieval Rome. But to return to our skating. What do the boys do in place of skating in Oxford or Sherburne with an oyster stew in some restaurant before the return trip? That was a happy year for the boys when Maydole began the manufacture of skates. What a job it was to put the heel skates on, and what a job it was to dig out the ice from the heel plates before adjusting the skates.

    That year in order to increase the sale of his skates Maydole had a large plow to scrape the snow from the ice, and he arranged droughts to carry water on to the ice so as to form a new surface when the old one became rough. This lasted but one winter. After that we had to attend to the question of ice ourselves. This involved a trip to the lock below the aqueduct where the small gates were opened, drawing the water from the level until the ice cracked and sank. Then these gates were closed and the water running in from Madole’s lock flowed over the ice, and upon freezing gave us a new surface.

    One can hardly realize today the excitement which the building of the can caused. I know this only from the old accounts in a very rare book, the History of Chenango County, published I know not how many years go. Everyone wanted the canal to run by his house. It was thought that this would insure a a good supply of fine water in the adjacent wells. It was even seriously proposed by the residents, not by the engineers, have the call run the length of Main street, right through the center of the street. It was doubtless with this idea of furnishing fresh water that the basin was extended from Maydole’s factory up to near the center of the town, back of Porter O. Wood’s store.

    Thinking of this old canal puts me in mind of an adventure I had somewhat connected with. The older boys will remember that the canal ran along one side of Mead’s pond, and they may remember that Mead’s pond was a great place for bullheads. Well, three or four of us boys went on a fishing trip to Mesad’s pond. On the shore we found a boat and this we borrowed without taking the trouble to ask permission of the owner. No Norwich boy of that day ever thought of asking permission for anything - chestnuts or apples or “Georgetown’s “ watermelons - but that is another story.

    Well, we paddled the boat out into the middle of the pond and hitched it thee to a pole driven into the mud by means of a chain which served as a pointer. Then we fished. How the bullheads did bite! It was not long until we had enough to sock a small sized fish market. Then came the time for starting home, but that was a serious matter. We had wound the chain several times around the pole and these loops had sunk to the bottom. We pulled and pulled but we could not start the chain.

    Anyone who has died it knows how chain will hold. We all got in he bow and pulled, but all we did was o sink the bow, without loosening the chain. We tried fishing for the chain with our lines, but in vain. There was but one way of escape, and that was to swim for the shoe. So we stripped and made our clothing into bundles which were securely fastened on our heads by means of our suspenders, and away we went leaving all our fish behind. I have often wondered how the owner recovered his boat, but I never dared to ask him about it.

    Another feature about the canal which is lacking now was the daily packet, run by Captain Stevens from Norwich to Binghamton and return. How proud were those boys who were on good enough terms with the captain to go down to the first lock and ride back on the boat. What a contrast theres was between it jogging along at six miles an hour and the slowly moving canal boat.

    What a delightful little cabin it had with its seats upholstered with cretonne and its windows with their turkey red curtains. It was a strange experience to pass through a lock when all one could see was the shining green walls as the boat slowly rose to the higher level. One year there was trouble for Captain Stevens for a steam packet was introduced as a rival. I think the name was the Water Witch. [Note: This undoubtedly was the Will-o’the Wisp.] It ran but a year or two and then departed to the same unknown land it came from. 

    What did Norwich boys do now when they wish to heckle someone? The canal is gone and with it the chance to bother and irritate those precocious and profane boys the canal boat drivers, known in our refined boat language as “hoagies.” Was their ever any one who could equal them in profanity and in ability to throw stones? 

    Yet they were a class to be pitied. Was ever a boy cast into a harder life, or farther removed from everything which would tend to elevate than one of those “hoggies?” The passing of the canal has at least one good side in that it has done away with these unfortunates in several counties. A boy is but a savage; he has every trait of a savage.

     It was not from viciousness that I wish others yelled insulting rhymes at these canal drivers. It was that I, like the others, was passing through a savage state. I had no keen realization that I was doing anything wrong. I was only acting as my ancestors did long years ago in the forests of England or in the swampy regions of Friesland. I was merely passing through as an individual just those same phases that have been traversed by the Anglo Saxon race.

    Well, the canal has gone. One today can hardly realize its great usefulness in the early days. It brought to us coal and merchandise. It carried away our produce. The Chenango Lake boat line with its agents in the various towns made money for its owners. Then came the railroads and the canal fell into innocuous desuetude and finally passed away altogether.

    But it will always remain a pleasant memory to the boys of 1860 and earlier and later, a stretch of water with a good deal of poetry about it, for we soon forget the dirty water, room made more dirty by the leaking from the gas works. We forget the dirty boat, inhabited by still more dirty individuals. We forget its mosquito breeding powers. We remember only the swimming at the aqueduct, the winter skating and bullheads to be caught under Conkey’s bridge, the dark ones good, the lighter colored individuals with blue eyes regarded as deadly “pine.”

               


                         West Street in Sherburne in canal days.

                                        The Old Chenango Canal

                                                By George Walter

                      [From the Brookfield Courier, April 17, 1947]

    An overgrown, man-made furrow etched across the face of Madison County remains as a mute reminder of the lusty days of the old Chenango Canal. Younger and smaller than the “raging” Erie, int nevertheless played a vital role in the villages and communities along its route, bringing industry and wealth to many.

    Unlike the Erie, there seem to have been no picturesque characters, no lusty songs to keep the legend of the Chenango Canal live. When the last boat passed through the canal in 1876, the doorway to pioneer Madison County was closing.

    To George W. Parks of Madison, who lived near the Chenango canal as a boy, the old days on the canal are still a vivid memory. 

    “In the spring of 1873 my father moved from Rome to Deansville, now Deansboro, in Oneida county and sorted a tin shop,” Mr. Parks reminisced recently. “The old Chenango Canal was then in full blast. I was about 10 years old. Boats plying this inland waterway would carry about two hundred tons. Between the locks was called a level. In some of the levels was a basin, for three reasons; one to turn the boat, one for short levels to have a surplus water, and the third for unlading freight. 

    “There was no machinery in those days for unloading coal. When a boat loaded with coal had to be unloaded, two or three men would go down in the hold and shovel coal up on the deck and others would shovel it into wheel barrows, and push it to the shed. In those days you could buy enough coal to last all winter for what you pay for nine ton now, for no one had a furnace and only one stone.

    “Below Deansville there was a village with blast furnaces called the Franklin Iron Works, where they smelted the iron ore from around the Clinton area into the pig iron. The canal brought coal to the furnaces and carried away the pig iron.”

    Of the coal itself, Mr. Parks said it was from six to eight feet deep, depending on the soil whether sandy or soft, pointing out that there was one place near the combined locks of three in one at Oriskany Falls where the quicksand was so bad that they had to dig it out often.

    “I do not believe there ever was another canal that had as many locks as the Chenango,” he continued. “There were 36 locks between Deansville and Utica, a distance of 14 miles. The locks wee built very strong. There was one in back of my father’s house, and when it was abandoned, my brother, Arthur, and I tore it apart and got our winter’s wood out of it. Then sides had a dry wall of limestone and covering of Georgia pine, heavy timber about 8 inches square, up and down sides about 6 feet apart and covered with a 2 and one-half-inch plank.

    “The bottom was the same, with the exception that the timbers went under the wall. The gates were made with 10-inch square timber, each end on top was 10 inches one end and 16 inches on the other, the heavy end projected over the land and acted as a lever to open the gates and balance to keep the gates from sagging. In the bottom of each gate were two small gates for filling and emptying the lock and cogs fixed with a rod reaching to the top with a wheel on it. When the gates were closed they were at about an angle of 45 degrees. “When the locks were built there was a space built in that wold just  fit the gates that made them even with the sides. 

    “Every two or three miles was a lock tender’s house with an old-fashioned fireplace and oven and Have watched Mrs. Burlingame, the lock tender’s wife bake bread in the oven. And it was good!

    “The boats that plied the Chenango Canal each had two cabins, one for the captain and his family and the other for the horses. Every village along the route had canal barns and a blacksmith shop where the horses would be given in with their breasts and shoulders a mass of raw flesh. After the Humane Society was formed this was done away with.

    “Before I left Deansville I picked wild apples from trees that had grown in the center of the old canal bed and sold them for cider apples. All land owners through which the canal passed were given back their land by paying for the deed.”

    As a final recollection, Mr. Parks remarked: “I was in Deansville just long enough to help tear down the bridge and fill in the roadway before I went to Rome to live and learn the trade of sheet iron worker.”

Binghamton Sun

February 25, 1954

It Used to Cost 9 Cents to Send a Ton of Straw to Utica

Woe (Fines)  Befell Chenango Canalboat Skippers

Who Ran Afoul Numerous Regulations of 1870 Era

By Joe Coyne

    Like to ship a ton of straws to Utica for only nine cents? Well, if you could spare about three or four days until your customer desired delivery and were living in 1870 you could do it on the Chenango Canal.

    According to a listing of rates charged on the canal for the transport of items, straw and more than 25 other items could be shipped from Binghamton to Utica for less than one pays for a bus ride from Binghamton to Johnson City today.

    Owner of the list published in 1870 is Mrs. Mabel Perry Smith, an antique dealer of 197 Riverside Drive, Johnson City. The list is the oldest document found of the old Chenango Canal since the search for canal lore began two months ago. At that time, William H. Hill, a member of the Central New York Parks Commission and publisher of The Binghamton Sun, began the move for a restoration of a section of the old canal in Chenango Valley State Park as a tourist attraction.

    Since announcement of restoration proposals, local amateur historians have dug into their attics searching for replicas and history of the canal which was closed to traffic in 1876, after a nearly 40-year existence.  Although many persons have furnished information about the canal, the document of Mrs. Smith’s entitled “Rates of Toll, 1870, Established by the Canal Board on Persons and Property Transported on the New York State Canals to Take Effect on the Opening of Navigation,” is the first source found in the area which existed when the canal was in  operation.

    Since Mr. Hill’s announcement of plans, many organizations in the area, including the board of directors of the Binghamton Chamber of Commerce and the Binghamton Exchange Club, have given their whole-hearted support of to the project. Action is now awaiting the arrival of officials of the New York State Parks Commission who have said they would be in Broome County “as soon as possible” to explain all possibilities.

    Some ideas already proposed by local enthusiasts include restoration of a lock at Chenango Forks, the moving of an old covered bridge near Downsville in Delaware County to the proposed restoration site and the rebuilding of an old canal barge to give rides to tourists.

    To keep abreast of the times in which the canal was active, however, a passenger should be charged four cents a mile for the entire trip or three cents a mile if he wishes to commute. At any rate, those were the charges made between Binghamton and Utica in 1870. If a child under 10 went along under the rate schedule of May 10, 1870, he would pay one-half mil per mile or one cent for each 20 miles.

    Making a profit on the canal seemed to be a hard thing if rules and regulations were enforced by the Canal Commissioners. Numerous fines were imposed on barge captains for the least little inflation of rules. Most of the fines were $5 and $10.  A $10 fine was imposed for not having a light on both ends of a raft if it were tied up for the night along the canal while another  $10 could be imposed for nor obtaining clearance to use the canal from a collector.

    A captain who didn’t have his boat weighed within 30 days after obtaining clearance could be fined $5 while another $5 fee could be imposed if his light weight were not taken again in four years. All this, however, presupposes detection.

    Along with straw, other articles which could be transported on the canal for one-half mil for each  1,000 pounds per mile were ashes, bones, coal, horseshoes, ice, car wheels, iron and manure. For one mil per 1,000 pounds per mile or a total of 18 cents a ton for the approximate 90-mile trip from Binghamton to Utica, a shipper could send bacon, car axles, onions, sugar, railroad cars, fish, rice, coffee or wool in addition to many other articles.

    Getting into the higher brackets, for one and one-half mils per 1,000 pounds per mile, barley, cheese, cider, hides, rags, rye, vinegar varnish, tobacco and grease could be sent, while two mils, live hogs, sheep, butter, apples, sulfuric acid, hops and grass seed might be transported.

    Toll charges for other goods ranged from two and one-half mils per half-ton mile for buffalo, deer, live horses to four mils for powder, gun powder, shrubbery and trees to five mils for window blinds and shashes. Special rates were provided for shingles and lumber ranging from one-half mil to eight mils depending on the type and cuts being transported.

    When setting out on his journey from Binghamton, the barge captain, according to the 1870 listing, had to exhibit to each collector along the route a “just and true account or bill of lading of such property, signed by himself and by the consignor thereof…”

    In addition to declaring the place where the goods came from and where they were to be sen, the captain would also have to give the names, description and weight of all articles in his boa which were charged by the ton; the number of articles charged by foot. In addition to being a human  encyclopedia, “every master should know the contents of his argo so that he can, if required, verify his bill of lading by his oath,” so says the schedule of rates.

    It was also up to the boat captain to see that the name of his barge and hailing place were painted in letters four inches tall “in some conspicuous and permanent part of the outside of the boat.” If the name of the boat was changed or if reported differently to the canal collector, the captain could be slapped with a $10 fine.

   According to the regulations of 1870, another $10 fine was in vogue if a captain obstructed the canal by mooring a float, sinking a vessel or “for omitting to have a knife on the stem of the boat.” Anyone of these fines could be imposed at any or of all three collector stations along the route. In 1870 these stations were at Hamilton under James Thompson; Oxford under Frederick B. McNeil and in Binghamton under Frederick M. Abbott.

    If this wasn’t enough, the poor captain might be snagged by one of three superintendents who in 1870 were Joseph W. Forward of Bouckville, Charles W. Olendorf of Norwich and Justus B. Willmot of Binghamton.

        

From: Few Are Left to Know by Lou Ella E. Gridley, Folklore of Chenango County Vol. 2 , Chenango County Historical Society 1970]

    Although rivers were easier to travel upon than roads, they did not always run in the right direction. When rumors of a canal began to circulate about the county, there was great excitement. Mr. Hudson Lyon, of Bainbridge, has seen a letter written in 1825 by Ambrose Lyon in which the proposed dredging of the Unadilla River for navigation, was mentioned. It was too much of a problem, however. and soon the Chenango Canal was decided upon.

    The Chenango Canal was started in 1834 and was completed in 1837. It connected Utica and Binghamton. Although the canal was used chiefly for freight, there were one or two passenger boats. At first it was considered quite an adventure to ride from one town to the next on the packet. Those who could not ride, could at least go down to meet it when the boat tied up. They could watch the freight being loaded and unloaded and they could get the latest news.

    When the canal was first completed and the water began to fill it, the people near by discovered that their cellars were filling too. There was consternation. Some began to plan to move to higher land and others thought of suing the canal company. The matter took care of itself, however. The canal mended its own leaks and the water drained from the cellars and never returned. (Told by Mrs. Hudson H. Lyon of Bainbridge).

    When Mrs. Nettie Curtis was a little girl, she remembered going to Norwich with her father on the lumber wagon. She was so little that her feet stuck straight out in front of her on the high seat. She had learned her letters and she spelled out the big letters on the side of the canal boat, P-A-C-K-E-T. Her father told her what the word was. There were big red letters on the side of Smith's Warehouse, too. They kept all kinds of freight there.  It was on East Main Street near where the station is now.

    The tracks followed the route of the canal for a distance. She liked to watch the boats pass each other. The huge tow rope of the slower boat was dropped deep enough in the water to allow the faster boat to pass over it. The boats were drawn by four or six mules driven by very tall and very black negroes. The captains were white men. Most of the boats carried lumber. One time the captain of a faster boat, a man no one liked, signaled to pass another boat. The captain of the slower boat was tired of the other's domineering ways, so when the canal boat was part way by, he tangled the ropes and slowed down the faster boat's progress. The people watching got a lot of amusement out of the captain's embarrassment. (Told by Mrs. Nettie Curtis of Oneonta)

    The canalers were noted fighters. Nat Gordon was one of these famous fighters. Dan Coles, another old canalman, said that if you wanted to fight, all you had to do was go to North Norwich and there was sure to be someone there who would fight with you. The canal men "hung out" at the hotel in North Norwich and there was sure to be a fight in progress out in front.  During the winter, when ice stopped transportation, the boats were tied up. Someone had to stay near to chop the ice from around the boat. Otherwise, the boat would have been crushed in by the expanding ice. Nat Gordon, the fighter,  spent money on drink for himself rather than upon grain for his horse.

    In the spring he brought them out looking like bags of bones. But during the summer they began to fatten and they became sleek again. The grass along the tow path was fresh and green. (Told by Edmond Lyons of North Norwich)

(P. 17)    Edmond Wilkes of North Norwich said the canal went along the back of his garden. There was a large tree near the canal at one spot, where the bank was steeper. The boat could draw up nearer the bank in that spot than in any other for some distance, so that tree was usually the place where the mule was changed. 

   One little mule that he remembered was much smaller than the others, but she could get the boat under motion much faster than any of the other tow animals. She strained hard at the rope, lying so low that her stomach almost scraped the ground. When it came her turn to pull, she did not wait for the plank to be placed from the boat to the bank for her to walk across. She gave one jump and was in her place ready to be hitched. When it was her turn to ride and rest, she jumped on again, without the gang plank.