The Erie Canal at 200

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October 2025 marks the 200th anniversary of the opening of the Erie Canal. Much ink has been spilled by historians about this engineering marvel – though surprisingly not much, relatively speaking, about its environmental history.[1] In this post, I’m going to concentrate on that aspect of the canal as well as some of the transborder US-Canada dimensions.

Built by the State of New York between 1817 and 1825, this artificial waterway was the megaproject of its day. And unlike almost all subsequent megaprojects, it was widely considered a success. The Erie Canal was a vital nation-building link, suturing together the still-fledgling American republic, and kicking off a continental canal-building mania. 

The 363-mile-long Erie Canal connected Buffalo, on the eponymous Great Lake, to the Hudson River near Albany; from there, vessels could make their way downstream to New York City. The first iteration of the canal featured eighty-three locks plus eighteen aqueducts to carry it over other waterways. Towpaths allowed draft animals to pull vessels along. At Lockport, the canal required flight locks and a deep cut through rock in order to climb the Niagara Escarpment (see images below) .

From Annual Report of the State Engineer and Surveyor of the State of New York for the fiscal year ended September 30, 1915 (Albany : J. B. Lyon Co, printers, 1916).
Original Locks at Lockport [1825] — from Annual Report of the State Engineer and Surveyor of the State of New York for the fiscal year ended September 30, 1915 (Albany : J. B. Lyon Co, printers, 1916) — facing p. 12
View east of eastbound Lockport on the Erie Canal by W.H. Bartlett, 1839. Public Domain.

By providing a water highway from Lake Erie to Hudson tidewater, the canal opened up western New York State and the Midwest to settlement. At the same time, it helped make New York City the primary port on the Atlantic seaboard. People and goods moved west through the locks, while wheat, grain, and wood from new homesteads flowed east. Though the canal aided the expansion of settler society, that growth had myriad negative consequences for the homelands of the Haudenosaunee Six Nations (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora).

I’ve long been fascinated by the Erie Canal. Since my doctoral work was about the St. Lawrence Seaway, I was interested in all canals, especially those within the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin. Consequently, I visited the “big ditch” and read everything I could about it. After finishing my PhD, I proceeded to do research on other hydraulic control efforts in upstate New York that were linked spatially and conceptually to the Erie. Then, in my 2024 book about the environmental history of Lake Ontario, the “canal that built a nation” figured more prominently since most of its route is in the watershed of that Great Lake. 

Designing the Erie’s liquid route required amassing knowledge of local landscapes and ecological conditions. At the time, many expressed concern about the environmental impacts. However, these worries were chiefly directed at the way that altering the natural environment might hurt or hamper a canal’s functionality: e.g., increased erosion and siltation that could choke up the canal, or floods from manipulated hydrologies that might damage the aquatic infrastructure. Settlers also anticipated that “rain would follow the plow”, warming the local climate (keep in mind that this was the late stages of the Little Ice Age).

One of the leading plans for the nascent Erie Canal actually had it connecting to Lake Ontario, working in tandem with another canal avoiding Niagara Falls. But the route ultimately chosen did not directly utilize Lake Ontario. Historians have attributed the Erie’s inland route to fears about exposure to British North America, with whom the U.S. had recently been at war, and the desire to draw off shipping and trade that would otherwise go via Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River. That latter motivation may have been exaggerated, however, in retrospective efforts to stress the nation-building thrust of the canal. 

A number of smaller canals in upstate New York were built to connect with the Erie Canal. A canal connected the Black River to the Erie by climbing the western Adirondack foothills. The Oswego Canal essentially followed the line proposed by the earlier plans to connect the proto-Erie Canal to Lake Ontario. Several other canals – Genesee Valley, Cayuga–Seneca, and Chenango – ran south from the Erie Canal. The Oswego was the only one of these lateral canals that wasn’t a financial bust, partly because it brought the product of the salt works near Syracuse to markets and took tourists on the fashionable tour with its requisite stop at Niagara Falls.

Meanwhile, British Canada responded with its own constructed waterways that connected to Lake Ontario, most prominently the Rideau, Trent, and Welland Canals. Though the British colonial elite may have viewed the Welland as a rival to the Erie and an attempt to defend against American economic and military might, locals in the Niagara frontier were just as likely to view Canadian and American canals in the Lake Ontario basin as complementary and interlocking. 

Indeed, the Welland Canal proved to be as much an extension of the Erie and Oswego Canals as a competitor.[2] Goods could move through canals in Upper Canada to Lake Ontario and then on through the Oswego and Erie Canals to New York City and beyond. In 1834, for example, the Welland Canal conveyed 40,634 bushels of wheat to Montreal while sending 224,285 bushels to the American market through Oswego.[3]

Appreciable amounts of wheat were also shipped from the United States to British Canada via Lake Ontario. When this grain was milled in Toronto or Montreal, it could be classified as “Canadian” and escape duties or prohibitions if shipped elsewhere in the British Empire, such as Caribbean plantations that sent products like sugar in return. 

Other significant economic interchanges across Lake Ontario – salt, timber, and potash – had preceded the Erie Canal and soared after its completion. Once Britain dropped its colonial tariff preferences and the 1854 Reciprocity Treaty came into effect, there were times when 80 percent of the foreign goods entering Upper Canada, which by that time was known as Canada West, came through the Port of Oswego.[4]

The Erie Canal proved so successful that its enlargement began in the 1830s – widening it and deepening it from 4 feet to 7 feet – though this was not complete for several decades. By the 1850s, the canal carried two million tons of freight a year. The canal helped make New York preeminent within the union, giving truth to the Empire State nickname. The Erie kept increasing its annual cargo even after the initial spread of railways, which were replacing canals elsewhere. In fact, Erie Canal tonnage didn’t peak until around 1880, decades after the iron horse galloped through the region . But cargo began to decline fairly swiftly afterward.[5]

The Erie Canal and its brethren had a range of ecological impacts. Some of the most obvious are introduced species and changes to water quantity and quality. Canals built in the first half of the nineteenth century were not very deep, but the bigger ones that followed required more extensive excavation. They generally needed to either utilize existing rivers or tap nearby waterbodies so that there would be enough water to carry barges and boats. 

Tugboats, grain boats, and grain elevators on the Erie Canal 8d18979v. Public Domain: https://picryl.com/media/tugboats-grain-boats-and-grain-elevators-on-the-erie-canal-8d18979v-50aa0f

Many wetlands, swamps, creeks, ponds, rivers, and lakes were fully or partially sacrificed to create the artificial rivers, with predictably detrimental impacts for aquatic species. This also lowered water tables in some of the surrounding areas. The Erie Canal separated the Montezuma Wetlands and the Galen Marsh, for example, from their water sources. Describing a stretch west of Utica where the water trough had drained nearby wetlands, novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that the trees were “decayed and death-struck.”[6]

Canals generally became heavily polluted. Mills and other industrial outfits were commonly found near locks because of the change in water elevation and transportation opportunities. The byproducts and waste of sawmills, the sawdust especially, smothered benthic communities at the bottom of waterbodies by robbing them of oxygen and burying spawning grounds. Such ecological alterations reduced aquatic resiliency even before the proliferation of other larger industrial concerns and their wastes.

Locks and dams blocked many species that needed to move seasonally through waterways. Conversely, canals could create viable pathways for the introduction of new species; it is possible that the Erie and Oswego Canals allowed sea lamprey into Lake Ontario (which then got past Niagara Falls and in to the rest of the Great Lakes through a reconfigured Welland Canal). Invasive alewives may have also arrived in the Great Lakes via this water route. 

Of course, canals also facilitated the spread of the planet’s most invasive species: humanity. The Erie Canal dictated the geography of settlement in upstate New York, ensuring that places such as Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo became major cities. In doing so, the canal led to larger populations and more industrial activities, which cumulatively had myriad ecological reverberations. The influx of white settlers, many of whom cleared land for agriculture, further marginalized the lifeways of the already beleaguered Haudenosaunee.

During World War I, the Erie Canal was expanded and incorporated into the New York State Barge Canal. These days, the Erie is mostly a recreational conduit plied by pleasure boats and kayaks. Much of the abandoned infrastructure from the older routes is still scattered across upstate New York: one of my favorites is the aqueduct across the Genesee River in downtown Rochester. 

There are many events planned for the bicentennial celebration of the Erie Canal. To inaugurate the canal back in 1825, New York Governor DeWitt Clinton led a flotilla of boats that took ten days to transit from Buffalo to NYC; Clinton then ceremoniously dumped Lake Erie water into the Atlantic. This “wedding of the waters” is being partially recreated in 2025, including a replica of the Seneca Chief boat which is slowly moving through the canal as I write this.

[1] There are a number of books about the Erie Canal and they discuss the environmental history to varying degrees; environmental historian Ann Norton Greene has done work on the maintenance of the canal: https://themaintainers.org/success-as-failure-historians-engineers-and-maintaining-the-erie-canal/

[2] Larkin, Overcoming Niagara, 111.

[3] Nelson, Oceans of Grain, 55.

[4] Widdis, “‘Across the Boundary in a Hundred Torrents’”

[5] Shaw, Canals for a Nation, 49

[6] Stradling, Nature of New York, 46.

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Daniel Macfarlane

Daniel is a Professor in the School of Environment, Geography, and Sustainability at Western Michigan University. He is an editor for The Otter-La loutre and is part of the NiCHE executive. A transnational environmental historian who focuses on Canadian-American border waters and energy issues, particularly in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin, Daniel is the author or co-editor of six books on topics such as the St. Lawrence Seaway, border waters, IJC, and Niagara Falls. His book "Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations" was published in summer 2023. His newest book is "The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History" (September 2024). He is now working on a book about Lake Michigan, co-editing a book on the St. Clair River/Delta/Lake, and is planning to eventually write a book on the environmental history of the Great Lakes. Website: https://danielmacfarlane.wordpress.com Twitter: @Danny__Mac__

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