author of The Erie Canal Exploring New York's Great Canals

Today’s #CanalConnection highlights Garnet Douglass Baltimore, who had an important impact on the canal and its surrounding communities. Baltimore was born in t...he bustling port at the eastern end of the Erie Canal, Troy, on April 15, 1859 and was named after two prominent abolitionists, Henry Highland Garnet and Frederick Douglass. Baltimore himself was the grandson of a formerly enslaved person, Samuel Baltimore, who had served during the Revolution and found his freedom in Troy after the war. Baltimore spent most of his life in Troy, including attending his hometown’s university, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he studied civil engineering, becoming the first ever African American to ever graduate from RPI. Baltimore put the skills he learned at RPI to good use, starting work with the New York State Department of Public Works shortly after his graduation in 1881. One of his most notable assignments while working for the state was overseeing the expansion of Lock #5 on the Oswego Canal, more commonly known as Mud Lock. The lock’s namesake mud, quicksand really, was a major impediment to Baltimore and his team. It was Baltimore who discovered the way to overcome it by developing a new way to test cement. This soon became the process used throughout the state. Baltimore’s experience with New York’s canals wasn’t confined to upstate either, he also worked on the Shinnecock and Peconic Canals at the eastern end of Long Island. Baltimore left New York’s canals in 1891, when he returned to his native city as an assistant engineer in Troy’s Public Improvement Commission. Baltimore spent the rest of his career in Troy and around, most notably designing Prospect Park, which offers sweeping vistas of the Hudson River, and a number of local cemeteries. Today he is memorialized in Troy with a street named after him and as a member of RPI’s Hall of Fame. You can also still see some of his canal work, as Mud Lock is still preserved by Onondaga County Parks at the northern end of Onondaga Lake Park. You can find out more about Garnet Douglass Baltimore in this excellent article published by RPI: https://rpi.edu/magazine/winter2005-06/pdf/28-33.pdf

CHRISTMAS AT BETH & KEITH MILLER'S CANAL LAMP INN (THE AGATE/ZORNOW HOUSE) Built in 1887 for John Agate, the Canal Lamp Inn remains one the village of Pittsfor...d's most stately homes. Designed by the Rochester architect Charles Crandall, it is a sophisticated example of the Queen Anne style. In the early twentieth century, my great grandparents, Herbert and Leslie Hutchinson, moved from the house that today serves as Pittsford Village Hall 2 doors down the street to this house to provide more room for their five children. The house then passed to my grandparents, Ted and Margaret Hutchinson Zornow, who also raised five children and lived in the house for many, many years. For the last fifteen years, Beth and Keith Miller have maintained the house as a labor of love. The present name "Canal Lamp Inn" is appropriate as all of the home's prior owners, John Agate, Herb Hutchinson, and Ted Zornow, owned and operated businesses on the Erie Canal. Every year when Beth decorates the inn for Christmas I feel nostalgic remembering the wonderful Christmases I and my family spent there in the past while growing up here in Pittsford.

Our #WhatIsItWednesday object was a ticket from 1911 to go ice skating at Monument Park, on what is today Clinton Square’s reflecting poll but what was then t...he frozen over Erie Canal, which cut right through downtown Syracuse. The city still proudly carries on the tradition of skating in Clinton Square thanks to Syracuse Parks & Rec! See more

During the initial construction of the Erie Canal, there was considerable opposition from most New York residents who resided along the Hudson River from NYC to... Albany. Most people couldn’t understand the rush to build a waterway to the west, which was a very sparsely populated frontier at the time. Little did they know how much the canal would mean not only to the development of Western NY, but to the Hudson Valley and New York City. Shown here is a depiction of the New York harbor 27 years after the opening of the Erie Canal. #tbt #ThrowbackThursday See more