Making It Work

September 4 - October 29,2000 Dyson Hall, 1st floor Nott Memorial 

An exhibition of working models and original structural drawings of the engineering triumphs of the Erie Canal.
 

Plan of Waste Weir, section 248, Tow Path Side   
 F. Mahler c.1856, ink and water color/paper, 16 3/4" x 24 1/4"
courtesy of New York State Archives  B0292 101:35

 

    The Erie Canal, begun in 1817, was a triumph of early engineering in the United States and one of the most ambitious construction projects of nineteenth-century America.  The driving force behind the canal project was the mayor of New York City, DeWitt Clinton.  Completed in 1825, the original Erie Canal is often referred to as "Clinton's Ditch."  It was forty feet wide and four feet deep.  Ten years after its opening, the Erie Enlargement was begun, built in response to the immediate overcrowding of the original.  Finished in 1862, the Enlargement expanded the canal to seventy feet wide and seven feet deep.  In 1903 a third canal was begun, known as the Barge Canal.  Completed in 1918, it used a new route in many places and required no towpath, as the boats were self-propelled instead of drawn by horse or mule.  The Barge Canal is still in use today. 

  Engineering the Erie Canal required careful consideration of a great many factors.  A canal must be level and changes in its water level must be quantum, not gradual.  Bridges are necessary for all paths that cross a canal, and canals require aqueducts in order to cross other bodies of water.  Canals require careful maintenance to guard against breaks and must have constantly-regulated supplies of water.  Flooding and ice can be devastating to a canal that does not meet exacting standards of design, construction, and maintenance.  In order to make it convenient to use, lock operation, water supply and regulation, bridge operation, boat weighing and toll collection, dredging, patrolling, and boat operation must all be carefully planned.  

Mud Creek Aqueduct Near Palmyra   
F. Osborne c. 1845, ink and watercolor/paper 21 1/4" x 25 1/4"
 courtesy of New York State Archives B0292 90:57

The first builders of the Erie Canal faced these enormous engineering challenges at a time when there were almost no professional engineers in the United States.  Many of the principal engineers of Clinton's Ditch were not professionally trained engineers when they began the project.  Nevertheless, they were able to construct a canal so successful that it outgrew itself almost immediately.  During the Enlargement, the canal was deepened, widened, and most of the original single locks were replaced with double locks, enabling traffic to pass through a lock in both directions simultaneously.  The Erie Canal created a large demand for professional engineers and designers, and during the Enlargement, many were trained by the newly-formed engineering programs at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY (1824) and Union College in Schenectady, NY (1845).  More than thirty Union College graduates were active in the Erie Canal Enlargement.

  Thousands of survey maps and structure drawings were prepared during the years of the Erie Enlargement and for subsequent additions and repairs.  They served as a means of visual communication between the designers, engineers, builders, and canal authorities.  These drawings illustrate the hundreds of new locks, aqueducts, stop gates, bridges, culverts, waste weirs, weigh locks, guard locks, dams, lock tender's houses, and other structures built for the canal between 1835 and the end of the century.  Preserved today in the New York State Archives, they constitute one of the most extensive and aesthetically striking collections of historic engineering drawings in the world.  The models exhibited in Making It Work were constructed using these drawings as their guide, just as the original structures on the canal were built using them.  The drawings exhibited in Making It Work provide an introduction to this extraordinary collection of documents, and together with the models, serve to illuminate the many complex engineering structures of the Erie Canal.