The Canal Index project was begun in the in the early days of the American Canal Society. It is kind of a wonky title, but the goal was to create a file or index of all the remaining canal structures, or to document the traces of canals that were disappearing under construction projects.
To learn more about it I went back into the ACS archives. In American Canals issue number 3, dated November 1972, the leadership of the society introduced the idea of a Canal Index Committee, where canals and structures would be inventoried and recorded on 5 by 8 index cards. In the next issue of American Canals a blank form was included with the hopes that the membership would be willing to contribute to the project. The article states that “in coordinating the vast amount of work done by individuals and canal societies throughout North America, it will serve, in published form, as basis for further research (archaeological or otherwise), for restoration/preservation activities, or simply as a form of brief guide for an enthusiast on a days outing.” You can tell that the founders were engineers.
The committee did create hundreds of records. In issue 14, they reported that the group had indexed all the submissions received so far on IBM keypunch cards and that they could generate a list nearly six feet in length. The next mention I could find was in issue 54, August 1985, where committee-chair Terry Woods notes that most of the Ohio and Pennsylvania canals had been surveyed and recorded, but New York and New Jersey had not.
The records that were generated are all available on the ACS website as pdf files. Look under the By States, and Other Countries drop down tabs. Although little has been done with the sheets since the late 80s, they do provide a remarkable record of what was there at the time. Over the years many of these sites have degraded or been lost.
It has been almost fifty years since the project was started and certainly there have been changes. I have long thought that it would be a nice project to add to the files and update what we have. We have a fillable-pdf form to make the recording of information a bit easier, and you can find this under the By State tab. So if you enjoy researching old canal structures, think about recording some information about them so that canal historians in the future can benefit from your explorations and discoveries.