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The end of the animal-powered canal boat, after decades of encroachment by steam vessels, came quickly.

Primitive steamboats had been sighted on the canal since the 1840s but  would remain a novelty for most of the century. Canal enlargement in the mid-19th century and improved steamer designs gradually changed things, though, and around 1880 the first practical steamers were introduced. The advantage of steam power was immediately apparent. While animal-powered fleets were limited to two vessels – so-called doubleheaders – a single steamer could push one boat (a consort) and tow up to five or six more.

The final Barge Canal enlargement of 1908–1918 permanently settled things. As each new section came online the towpath itself began to disappear. When the enlargement was completed, only powered boats could navigate the entire distance between Buffalo and Albany.

In 1916, the date of my scene, most steam-powered boats on the canal were of two types, both built of wood:  tugboats and steam canal boats. The U.S. government’s 1884 Report on the Ship-Building Industry of the United States helpfully includes a diagram of a steam canal boat, a functional design (besides pushing and towing unpowered boats, it could carry its own full cargo) that remained in service well into the 20th century.

This was the design I wanted for my 3D model – new technology (steam power) grafted onto traditional design (the wooden laker hull). Now I just needed to find a specific vessel on which to base the model.

Unfortunately, period photographs of Erie Canal steamers are about as rare as hen’s teeth. Repeated online searches turned up nothing.

Eventually I learned to combine two sources: the List of Merchant Vessels of the United States, published annually by the Department of Commerce, and the Great Lakes Vessels Online Index, maintained by Bowling Green State University. The 1916 edition of the List included around 40 vessels designated as “Scb,” or steam canal boat. Searching for each of these on the Bowling Green site resulted in a handful of matches – some of which included photographs.

For various reasons, including the clarity of the photo and strong evidence that the boat operated in this area, I chose a steamer named the Ashford. It is pictured at the top of this post.

According to the Index, the Ashford was 95 feet long and 17 feet 8 inches wide. It was built in 1883 in Buffalo and sank in the Barge Canal near Schenectady in November 1919 – “a total loss.”

Filling in the blanks

Online searches turned up several references to the Ashford. The earliest was a notice from the Buffalo Express reprinted in the August 22, 1883 issue of The Coal Trade Journal, which identified the Ashford as one of three canal steamers constructed by the Rochester and Pittsburgh Railroad Company.

The Rochester and Pittsburgh Railroad Company was founded in 1881 to haul coal from western Pennsylvania to Rochester and Buffalo. That was as far as its lines extended. The canal boats were to be used to ship the coal to the lucrative New York City market. The company’s 1883 annual report explains that land purchased in Buffalo will be developed into a railyard, but also that

. . . We have made two slips to accommodate eight canal boats . . . and have constructed coal shutes [sic] . . . so that coal can be shipped in canal boats at minimum cost.

The assumption that the Erie Canal was always in competition with the railroads, then, is an oversimplification. Things were more complicated, especially early on when hundreds of railways were being formed and struggling to grow and survive. In this case the R&P’s fledgling rail barons were merely attempting to leverage an existing resource – the canal – to give them a leg up on the competition – other railroads.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work out as planned. The Rochester and Pittsburgh went bankrupt and in 1887 all of its assets were sold. The rolling stock and track were converted into the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh Railroad, which would be absorbed into the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1932.

The company’s steamers apparently went their separate ways. The next mention of the Ashford that I can find is in the 1899 edition of The Blue Book of American Shipping, which gives the owner as one William Barker of Buffalo. The following year the Ashford is listed as one of two steamers owned by William J. Warwick, also of Buffalo. Ten years later the Ashford would be sold to Joseph A. Hutton of Rondout, on the Hudson River. Hutton may have been the final owner – I could find no others listed – and since this was the only steamer he owned, perhaps he was the skipper as well. Was he on board in November 1919 when the Ashford sank near Schenectady? It would be nice to know, but here the trail grows cold.

Here’s an interesting postscript:

In September, 1889, the Bishop, a canal boat towed by the Ashford, collided with the F.  W. Whalen, towed by the steamer Lizzie Crandal, while the two fleets passed each other a few miles west of the location pictured in my scene. Both the Bishop and the Whalen went down, and the owners of the Whalen sued the owners of the Ashford and the Bishop for damages.

The following year the District Court of the Southern District of New York dismissed the suit based on evidence that the Whalen had been on the wrong side of the canal at the time of the collision.

Rebuilding the Ashford

My sources for the model are a high-resolution photo of the Ashford (provided by Bowling Green University), and Robert E. Hagar’s excellent drawings of an 1870s-era laker, held by the Chittenango Landing Canal Boat Museum.

The photograph isn’t the best quality, unfortunately, and some detail (especially behind the wheelhouse) is impossible to figure out. As usual, my rule is to leave out details rather than make them up. (The model will be seen at a distance and the stern won’t be prominent, anyway.)

Once it’s finished the model is placed in the scene along with the three lakers. Our mighty fleet is at last under way.

Our Erie Canal laker model, shunted into digital dry dock last spring, will be expanded into a small fleet for our scene.

Of all the types of boats on the Erie Canal in 1916, the laker was the most common. Unpowered (or, in the jargon of the time, “unrigged”), it was the workhorse of the Erie Canal from the late 19th to the early 20th century. According to a Report on the Ship-Building Industry of the United States, published in 1884 by the U.S. Department of the Interior:

“The laker is a regularly framed boat, with perfectly flat bottom, square bilge, perpendicular sides, straight body, round bow and stern, and decked entirely over. It is made of oak and white pine . . . and it is 97 or 98 feet long, 17½ or 17⅔ beam, and 10 or 10½ feet in depth of side. . . .”

These boats . . . weigh from 65 to 72 tons, and carry 225 to 240 tons of cargo. They are usually painted white, and the stern is often profusely ornamented by a sign-painter, the name and home port being conspicuously painted in gilt and red and blue letters. About one-half of the boats on the Erie Canal are of this type. Being good for almost any service, these boats . . . are popularly used in forwarding grain from Buffalo and Oswego to New York city [sic] via the canal and the Hudson River.

In 1883 a newly built laker cost an average of $3,800, roughly equivalent to $95,000 today. It would see service for 10 to 15 years, perhaps longer if it were well maintained.

For much of this period most canal boats were animal-powered. A team of three mules, walking along the canal’s towpath, could pull two fully loaded lakers lashed together. These doubleheaders would allow the owner to maximize his or her carrying capacity (and profit) with a minimum crew.

That crew, which often included family members, lived in the aft cabins. The animals were housed in the bow cabin or bowstable. Two teams of three mules were switched every six hours and kept the boats moving 24 hours a day. The speed limit was 4 miles per hour – a brisk walking pace – but most boats averaged less, covering the 360 miles between Buffalo and Albany in five to seven days.

From 1880, steam-powered boats began to replace animal power. By 1916 – the date of our scene – the transition was virtually complete. Steel barges, another innovation, had made an appearance but their adoption would be interrupted by World War I, when all steel production would be diverted to the war effort.

So for the time being wooden lakers would be pushed and towed by wooden steamers. (There will be more about steamers in the next post.)

When they reached the end of their useful lives, wooden canal boats were often simply abandoned by their owners at “graveyards” where the canal was wide enough to accommodate their decaying wrecks.

One old graveyard can still be seen along the canal in Pittsford, New York, where the sad, old frames are exposed when the canal is drained for winter. It’s amazing that they have survived for so long.

Now that the terrain and major human-built objects are in place, it’s time to work on the scene’s natural elements: grass, wildflowers, weeds, and trees.

But before I could start modeling, I had to familiarize myself with the species that are native to this area – and would have been a hundred years ago. The National Wildlife Federation Field Guide to Trees of North America and the National Wildlife Federation Field Guide to Wildflowers of North America became my constant companions this fall. Both are densely packed with photos, maps and detailed descriptions of hundreds of species. Great for browsing at home as well as using in the field.

Sometimes it was possible to identify trees in historical photos. I settled on a mix of northern red oak, black walnut, and sugar maple. Some trees that are common here now, such as black locust and honey locust, were omitted because they are not native and I was not able to find out when they would have been introduced.

I collected and scanned leaves for identification and to use for modeling. Scanned leaves can be processed to create the different textures needed for 3D model construction.

All of the foliage was created in SpeedTree, an industrial-strength tree and foliage 3D modeling tool that’s widely used in the motion picture and gaming industries. SpeedTree is one of those applications that does only one thing, but it does it very, very well. It has a short (but steep) learning curve. But once you begin to master it you can build just about anything.

I used SpeedTree to make several models of each tree species, in various stages of growth. I also made about a half-dozen types of wildflowers, all of which should have been present in late September-early October 1916.

As a test, many of the species were mixed and placed in a new Terragen scene. Terragen shines when it comes to foliage because of its ability to place populations of thousands of models, its sophisticated noise and fractal functions that can be used to create natural-looking species distributions, and because of its renderer. This scene consists of billions of polygons, yet Terragen produced a rendering in a couple of hours without breaking a sweat. Impressive indeed.

Besides foliage, I’ve also started building an assortment of small objects that will add detail to the scene. Here’s a selection of barrels that will be placed around the terminal area, on horse-drawn vehicles, and on the canal barges.

Some care has to be taken in placing the trees in the working scene. It’s easy to overdo it. A hundred years ago this area would have been nearly clearcut to make space for farming and canal construction. In the decades since, unchecked second-growth woods have filled in much of the area depicted in our scene.

The new scene rendering shows the foliage in place with a scattering of cirrus clouds in the sky. It’s beginning to look like a picture.

The canal scene is to be set in 1915 or 1916, a time of change for the Erie Canal. At enormous public expense, the canal was being upgraded to compete with the railroads. It was widened, all of the locks were replaced and enlarged, and dams and reservoirs were built to replace much of the original channel with “canalized” sections of the Mohawk River and other streams. The work began in 1909 and continued into 1917.

Wooden canal boats pulled by teams of horses or mules were being phased out. Eventually they would be replaced by large steel barges pulled by commercial tugboats. But change comes gradually at best and in 1917 all U.S. steel production was diverted to the war effort. So at this time there were still many traditional wooden Erie Canal boats in service. Some were animal-powered, some were towed by tugs. Some were combined into fleets of two or three boats and pushed and pulled by wooden steamers.

At this time the classic Erie Canal boat was the lakeboat or “laker,” which was around 98 feet long and had a cargo capacity of 240 tons. Lakers carried lumber, coal, gravel, and grain between Buffalo and Albany, or all the way to New York City via tug along the Hudson River.

My laker is based on plans drawn by Robert E. Hagar and now held by the Chittenango Landing Canal Boat Museum. It measure 97½ feet from bow to stern and has a draft of about 9 feet. In the traditional laker, the front cabin served as the stable (or “bowstable”) for the animal teams. Living quarters were in the stern cabin. It wasn’t unusual for entire families to live and work on board all season.

The lift bridge that crosses the canal at Adams Basin was completed in 1913. The technical name of this type of bridge is a mouthful: Warren pony truss towerless lift bridge. Warren bridges use equilateral triangles to spread out the load on the bridge. “Pony truss” refers to the fact that there are no braces across the top of the bridge framework.

But the operative word here is “towerless.” This bridge is one of 16 similar bridges constructed along the western section of the Erie Canal in the early 1900s. Unlike traditional lift bridge designs, they do not use towers to lift the roadbed. Instead, the machinery is contained in concrete-lined pits on either side of the bridge. Two 12-horsepower electric motors are sufficient to raise and lower the bridge. The heavy lifting, so to speak, is done by counterweights and a system of cables that ensure that all four corners are raised and lowered at the same rate.

These may the first such bridges ever built, and they are virtually unique. Designed by a team of anonymous New York state engineers, the bridges’ durability and reliability are attested to by the fact that almost all are still in daily use.

The Erie Canal, which runs just a mile or so from our home, has a long and colorful history.

For some time I’ve wondered if it might be possible to use 3D imaging software to recreate specific scenes along the canal at different moments in time. As a proof of concept I decided to work on a simple example: The Washington Street lift bridge in Adams Basin, shortly after the bridge was constructed in 1914.

Simple, because the terrain is flat and, at the time, Adams Basin was (or so I thought) a sleepy rural hamlet. A canal, a bridge, a road. Maybe a boat or two.

A bit of cursory research demolished that notion pretty quickly. As it turns out, Adams Basin was a much more interesting place a hundred years ago than it is today. It was a thriving community with its own canal terminal, post office, school, railroad station, and trolley station. (Yes, trolley. More on that later.) Retail and wholesale businesses – now long gone – lined the roads and canal. It had a lively political scene, too, with a dedicated group of civic-minded activists who, among other things, successfully lobbied the state for the construction of the lift bridge.

So there is much to do. The project has been underway now for several weeks (months), and as yet there is no end in site. But the research has been fascinating, and I’ve met some interesting people and have been able to hone my 3D visualization skills along the way.

The first problem: How to set up the underlying terrain for a 4-square-mile area around the bridge. New York state provides high-resolution digital elevation data for free. But a quick rendering of that data (above) revealed that it is pretty rough, full of gaps and artifacts. Cleaning this up would take a lot more effort than it would be worth.

The solution was to create a displacement map by hand. Using aerial photos as a guide, the canal, streams, and railroad embankments were carefully painted in Photoshop, working in 32-bit mode for the widest range of grayscale values. Dark values are depressions. Lighter values are higher elevations.

An oblique rendering of the displacement map in Terragen reveals a landscape that’s not much to look at, but it will work. The main feature is the canal bed, of course. But it also includes a north-south roadbed (north is to the right) and two long railroad embankments.

Grass and a temporary population of trees are added, a water surface is placed in the canal, and railways are placed to create the view shown at the top of this post.