The Black River Canal (NY)

The Black River Canal was one of New York’s many lateral canals that extended navigation to the north and south of the main Erie Canal. Today, it is a remarkably intact abandoned canal, largely due to the fact that parts of the southern end continue to be used as a feeder channel to supply water to the Barge Canal, however canal locks and the prism can be found all along the thirty-five miles between Rome and Lyons Falls. And lately a trail has been established along sections of the towpath, giving it further protections.

The southern end of the BRC joined to the Erie Canal in Rome. This was near the location of Fort Stanwix, or to be more precise, at the intersection of Black River and Erie Boulevards. The canal then headed north, climbing into the mountains by following the valley of the Mohawk River and then the Lansingkill gorge. Today State Route 48 closely follows this same route and remains can be seen all along the highway. When the canal reached it’s highest point at Boonville, it began to descend along the Black River valley toward Lyons Falls. Lyons Falls was the northern terminus of the canal, but not of the navigation. By using the Black River north for forty-two miles, boats were able to reach the village of Carthage. This, the state reasoned was a cost effective project by turning the thirty-five-and-a-half-miles of canal into seventy-seven miles of usable waterway into the Adirondack Mountains.

Planning for the BRC, and many other canals, began as soon as the Erie Canal was completed in 1825. Early plans for the canal were ambitious as the hope was to build a canal through and over the mountains to reach the St. Lawrence River at Ogdensburg. This would have involved a series of canals and river navigation along a route north of Carthage that used the Indian and Oswegatchie rivers, passing through Gouverneur and ending at Ogdensburg. This route would have been 146 miles long. In reality, construction on the system ended once the canal reached Carthage.

An interesting footnote of BRC history was the close examination of the Morris Canal’s (New Jersey) inclined planes to replace the need for the great number of locks that were purposed along the canal. In all, the BRC was to use 109 locks over the thirty-five miles between Rome and Lyons Falls, which means about four locks per mile. In contrast, the Erie Canal used eighty-three locks along it’s 363 miles between Albany and Buffalo. The well known canal engineer Holmes Hutchinson traveled to New Jersey and made an in-depth report as to the usefulness of the inclined planes. In 1905, Whitford devoted many pages in his history of the New York canals to Hutchinson’s study on the subject.

The talk about the canal, conducting surveys, and attempting to find a suitable route, went on for years, until 1836 when a law (Chapter 157 of 1836) was passed that authorized the construction of the canal. The year is significant as it was also the year that construction began on the enlarged Erie Canal, a canal that would need an increased supply of water to fill it’s channel. Whitford notes that the law allowed the state to take as much water as could be reasonably spared from the Black River to supply the summit of the Erie Canal at Rome. The canal was to be called, “The Black River Canal and Erie Canal Feeder.” A second factor in the authorization was the never-ended supply of lumber in the mountains and the opening of lands to settlement.

The 1836 law was not without it’s opponents. Mill owners and those with interest is navigating the Black River pointed to the Act of 1811 that gave them ownership of all the waters of the Black River, and that the state was breaking it’s own law by taking water for the Erie Canal.

Water management on the BRC is a fascinating subject on its own. The Black River begins at the North and South Lakes (twenty miles due east of Boonville) and flows south-west toward Forestport, about fifteen miles (all distances are as a stright line, so the actual distance is much longer). It then flows north toward Hawkinsville which is three miles east of Boonville. The river continues to flow almost due north to Carthage and Great Bend, which is another forty-four miles. At Great Bend the river turns west to Watertown and Lake Ontario. Since the Black River is three miles east of Boonville and the canal route, a feeder canal was constructed to get the water from the river to the canal. To gain the proper slope so that water would flow between the river and canal, the feeder was extended for another seven miles to Forestport. To make the best use of this canal, it was built as a navigable canal, thus adding another ten miles to the navigation.

The feeder connected to a wide area along the river called Kayuta Lake. Later a dam would be built to create more of a reservoir. This watershed diversion was so important to the Erie Canal that even though the BRC was never a money maker, it’s supply of water was so critical to the operation of the Erie that the canal escaped a number of abandonment’s over the years. While most of the lateral canals were closed in 1877, the BRC kept flowing. And when the Barge Canal was constructed in the early 1900s, the BRC was kept as a navigable feeder. Even today, parts of the canal serve to take water from the Black River and pass it into the Mohawk.

Work on the BRC began in late 1837 and early 1838. Whitford’s history of canals gives a nice description of the work, and the requests made by people in the northern areas to extend the canal route either to Sackett’s Harbor on Lake Ontario, or to Ogdensburg and the St. Lawrence River. Whitford goes as far to list the routes, the cost, and the number of locks. Some construction on the feeder arm was done in 1841 and 42, during a drought that was hampering navigation on the Erie Canal. The Stop and Tax Law of 1842 brought all work to a halt. The construction materials, the lumber and stone, that had been purchased but had not being used were offered for sale to the public, selling for pennies on the dollar. Construction resumed in 1847, and by October 18, 1848, water began to flow through the feeder. In 1849 the amount of water being taken from the river to supply the Erie Canal exceeded the natural flow of water north causing the river to dry up for three months. To alleviate further shortages, a series of reservoirs were built to store water for the river and feeder. These include North Lake, Bisby Lake, and the Woodhull Reservoir. The Canal Society of NYS held a field trip to these sites in 2003, and for those with an interest in this system of water supply should find a copy of the guide book for the Adirondack Reservoirs. Whitford also delves into the subject.

The BRC was put into use on November 1, 1850, which means that navigation really began in the spring of 1851. There are a number of openning dates floating around. Whitford notes that the canal was in use in 1851, but was complete on November 13, 1855. The large canal map that the state published in 1862 states that the canal was completed in1849, so we can safely say that the canal was being used by 1851.

As this is not intended to be a complete history of the canal, I will skip forward to the 1870s when canal abandonment fever was sweeping across the state. The debate was could the BRC feeder system supply the needed amount of water to the Erie without the whole canal in use. The state wished to see if the Black River water could be sent south by using the Lansingkill and Mohawk and then taken into the canal at Rome. So an experiment was made in the spring of 1875, where the Erie Canal was opened before the BRC was filled. This supply proved to be insufficient and the experiment proved the worth of the canal as a feeder. This is how the BRC escaped the 1877 abandonment fate of most of the other lateral canals.

Nobel Whitford devotes an extensive number of pages in his history of canals to the work of David Whitford (his father, uncle?) who was selected to conduct a study on the water supplies of the Adirondack Mountains in the 1890s. At the same time, Verplank Colvin was advocating for the establishment of the Adirondack Park to protect the forests and thus the amount of water that could be used by the Erie Canal. The state created the Adirondack park in 1894 as a forever wild area under the NYS constitution, in part, to have water to fill the Erie Canal.

Abandonment would catch up with the canal as it was recommended by the state engineer to close the section of canal north of Boonville in the early 1900s. And this section was closed to traffic in 1905 as traffic had dwindled to almost nothing for several years. Oddly what saved this section of the canal, at least for a few years, was the Barge Canal and the construction of the Delta Dam. Rock and stone from quarries north of Boonville were to be used in the new dam and the best way to transport this stone was by the canal. Thus the canal and locks between Boonville and Port Leyden were refurbished and put into use for a few years.

During the construction of the Delta Dam, three new locks and a new aqueduct were constructed as to carry the canal around the new Delta Reservoir. The old canal from lock 7 to lock 13, including the village of Delta and the one-mile-long navigable Delta feeder, would be flooded by the new reservoir. The new concrete locks and aqueduct can be seen downstream and to the right of the dam. Lock 7 would be moved slightly south from it’s original site that was to be under the new dam. After all this work, the locks north of Boonville were refurbished once again in the hopes that the canal would be used up through the Black River and Carthage and the canal remained in a navigable condition into the 1920s.

And yet, only eighty-four boats left Boonville for Rome in 1921, three in 1922, and none in 1923. The canal was un-officially abandoned by disuse. The canal continues to carry water south to Rome by using the Forestport feeder and the section from Boonville to lock 63. At that point the water spills into the Lansingkill and flows south to join with the Mohawk River, and then into Delta Reservoir.

What all this later work has accomplished is to leave a relatively intact canal for historians to explore. By the time the canal was abandoned, the route of the highways and railroads had been established, so there was no rush to fill in the old canal and turn it into a highway or railroad. Over the years, some sections have been lost to the highways, most notably in the south along Black River Boulevard and north of Boonville along Rt 12. Most of the locks remain in fairly decent condition, although the aqueducts have removed due to flooding.

For those who are interested in further study, there are a number of good books. Of course, Whitford’s History of the New York State Canals was written while the canal was in operation, and it is likely the most complete. The book Forestport Breaks by Michael Doyle is a later look into how people were purposely breaking through the canal banks in the spring to cause leaks and floods, with the hopes that the state would hire locals to help make repairs. It was a job creation by destruction technique. The book Snubbing Posts by Thomas O’Donnell is called “An Informal History of the Black River Canal.” The Canal Society of New York State has printed four guidebooks for their field trips in 1981, 1994, 2003, and 2007. And then there is Walter Edmonds, who was a local author. Walter used the Black River country as a setting for his stories. Reading these delightful novels such as Rome Haul, or The Boyds of Black River (and many more), will give you a sense of what life was like in the southern Adirondack mountains and along the BRC.

The canal and locks are very visible on Google Earth, especially if you can go back to the 2003 images. From Rome to Boonville the route of the canal is very easy to follow. North of Boonville, the imagery is not so good, however by using the guidebooks and Google Earth and Google Maps, I was able to plot most of the canal structures. This work can be found in the Canal Index sheets.