Philip Lord, Jr [USA] & Chris Salisbury [UK] This webpage is abstracted from the article of the same title in Industrial Archaeology Review, Volume XIX, 1997, published by the Association For Industrial Archaeology, Department of Archaeological Studies, Leicester University, UK. Reprints are available from the publisher.
In the decade between 1792 and 1802, Schuyler's company cleared channels of fallen trees and boulders, erected low rock V-dams, or "weirs", across rifts to raise water levels, and completed three short canals, with dams and locks, to circumvent the falls at Little Falls [1795], the Oneida Carry at Rome [1797], and two rapids near Fort Herkimer [1798]. The most troublesome of the inland waterways was Wood Creek, a narrow and twisted channel which connected the west end of the 1797 Rome Canal to the east end of Oneida Lake (now Sylvan Beach). This stream was so narrow that travelers often recorded they could jump across it where the boats first entered it, and it was so deficient of water that boatmen often had to negotiate with a miller just above the landing place to release extra water from his pond to get the boats floated and on their way. Yet in spite of its fragility, Wood Creek was the lynchpin of the waterway route to the Great Lakes. And it is in the upper reaches of this tiny stream that we find extraordinary evidence of a direct linkage between American wilderness engineering and English waterway history.
In the beginning, the work was carried out by contractors, often local persons of some expertise, such as there might be in a rough and unsettled country. These men would employ and direct laborers and craftsmen in the execution of the plans, if the term "plan" can be applied in this case. Concepts for the works to be built were seldom set to paper, although an occasional reference to an odd drawing here and there crops up in the correspondence between the contractors and the company directors.
But of course, with bigger boats now in common use, what had been adequate gradually became, again, inadequate. The first place this was felt was in the shallowest section of Wood Creek, from the outlet of the 1797 Rome Canal down to the influx of the waters of Canada Creek from the north; a distance of about 3.5 miles by land, and nearly twice that by water. Boatmen coming down from the west in large boats, laden with the rich produce of the new settled farmlands, encountered nearly intolerable inconveniences, as described by General Schuyler himself in a report dated August, 1802:
A Durham boat deeply laden which I past on the 29th a few miles beyond the west end of the Oneida Lake, and which reached Wood Creek on the 31st, was under the necessity of making three trips to bring her cargo from Dean's Landing to the Oak Orchard, and with the aid of water from the Canal at Rome, she was enabled to come with half her cargo in two trips to Canada Creek, where she arrived on the 9th. Such is the paucity of water in Wood Creek and such the obstruction to laden boats. In 1802 the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company began to overcome the shalloness of the upper section of Wood Creek by building the first of four wooden dams, with locks, that would impound the shallows of that six miles of miserable navigation into a series of slack water sections; deep enough to overcome the sand bars, rifts and sunken timber that had plagued the route since the beginning of time.
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