Contact UsHow "Along the Erie Canal" Came To Be
In fall, 1991 I moved to Rochester, NY for an academic
job at the Rochester Institute of Technology. New York was Manhattan, not Finger
Lakes and apple orchards, so Western New York came as a complete surprise to
me. But what surprised me most was the extraordinary history of the region in
the 19th Century. In fact, as i was driving to Rochester i stumbled on the Hill
Cumorah - the site of the mysterious golden plates Joseph Smith "translated"
as the Book of Mormon. That set me to thinking...
Settled mostly by New Englanders - the ones who hadn't made it back home - Western
New York is heir to the Puritan vision of a perfect commonwealth, the Kingdom
of Heaven on earth. In the early 1800's, the region was swept like a prairie
fire by the most powerful religious revival ever to hit America, leaving "the
burnt-over district" in its wake. Among the newly conquered Iroquois, the prophet
Handsome Lake started a prairie fire of his own to lead the Seneca to a renewed
version of the traditional Longhouse religion. Young Joseph Smith was inspired
by this same evangelical fervor to invest his "Americanized" Christianity with
an extraordinary "Native American" history. Just a few miles east, the Oneida
Community created their version of the Kingdom of God on earth - including serial
marriage, common property, and communal child rearing. Two Shaker communities
fluorished in the region, and the "Publick Universal Friend" created a visionary
"Quakerism" in Penn Yan. The Spiritualist community of Lilydale traces its roots
back to the Fox sisters, whose famous "Rochester rappings" mark the birth of
"New Age" religion in the US. Chatauqua, just a few miles south of Lilydale,
originally a Methodist summer camp for lay education, is now a household word
for lectures, music, and art.
This religious radicalism spilled over into political activism. Frederick Douglass
wrote and distributed his newspaper, The North Star, in Rochester because
of the financial support of the abolitionists in the region. On its way to Canada,
the Underground Railroad stopped in Seneca Falls, where the first Women's Rights
Convention was held. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were the founding
mothers of suffragism and feminism. Truly, Western New York was "the Bay Area
of the 19th Century".
It was the Erie Canal that transported these radical ideas to Western New York.
In the early 19th century, the American East Coast was cut off from the interior
of the continent by broad mountain ranges - the Adirondacks, Alleghenies, and
Appalachians. Between Canada and central Georgia, there is only one natural
corridor through these mountains: the Mohawk River Valley, which runs along
the south side of the Adirondacks into the Hudson near Albany.
Thus the completion of the Original Erie Canal - "Clinton's Ditch" - in 1825
opened up an all-water route from the port of New York through Western New York
and on into the Midwest. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Europe, New
England, and the Mid-Atlantic states followed the New Englanders along the Canal to the West.
Some of them stayed: overnight, factories and mills sprang up along the Canal.
Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo grew from backwaters to boom towns in a few
short years. The American Industrial Revolution really caught fire in the "burnt-over
district", along the route of the Canal.
It was this mixture of Puritan idealism, industrial development, and immigration
which has made New Yorkers so tolerant of, and open to, new ideas, and fostered
a vision of America which we are still struggling to achieve: a society with equal
opportunity for all, built on a shared sense of stewardship and social responsibility
towards the community, and modelled on the early Roman Republic. The Erie Canal
flows past with cities with classical names: Rome, Utica, Syracuse. It still stands today
to DeWitt Clinton's vision of the republic as commonwealth.
By the 1840's you could travel by boat and canal barge from New York City to Buffalo,
then on to Cleveland, Cinncinati, Chicago, St. Louis, and down the Mississippi
to New Orleans. The industry and immigration which flowed along this
extensive waterways system gave the North huge advantages in population,
industry and, of course, transportation - advantages that were decisive in the War
between the States. But while canals continued to be important transportation arteries
well into the 20th Century, by the 1860's the great days of the Canal were already past.
By the completion of the Barge Canal (the third version of the Erie Canal) in 1918, canal
traffic was in decline.
Today, there is a canal revival - not for commercial purposes, but as a historical
and recreational treasure. Plans are underway to create a "traveller-friendly"
Canal, with all kinds of facilities, parks, and trails along the way. Fortunately,
the 1918 Barge Canal is in superb shape, as you can see from the film. All it
needs is a few good canal-side pubs and lots of private canal barges to bring
it to life as British canals have been!
While my original idea was to use the Canal as a way to examine the religious and political
radicalism of early 19th century New York, i soon realized that the story of the Canal was
more than enougt for one film. Having Tom Grasso as a collaborator certainly made that choice
worthwhile. Tom's knowledge and enthusiasm about the Canal is what makes "Along the Erie Canal"
special.
The Fox sisters and the angel Moroni will just have to wait for another film!
"Along the Erie Canal" was funded by a grant from the City of Rochester.