Tag: Erie Canal

The great aqueduct over the Genesee River at Rochester was built over fifteen months, from July 1822 to September 1823. 

Actual construction, however, took about eight months. Though work elsewhere along the canal line began each year in early spring, the aqueduct builders in Rochester waited till July, when the level of the river dropped. Most of its water was then diverted into the millraces on the east and west banks, allowing access to the rocky riverbed.

The contractors — Alfred Hovey, Abel Wethey, and a handful of others — may have been under pressure to finish the job quickly. The state’s canal commissioners hoped to open the entire canal from Albany to Buffalo by the end of 1823. They did not know that difficulties further west at Lockport would delay everything for another two years. In 1822, they may have assumed that Rochester would be the bottleneck. 

Already an entire year had been wasted. Hovey and Wethey’s contract represented the second attempt to cross the river. The first, commenced the previous year by William Brittin, had failed disastrously. Ill-prepared and underfinanced, Brittin had managed to erect only a culvert and the eastern abutment by the time the river rose that fall. During the ensuing winter it carried off the abutment, leaving behind a few straggling anchor bolts bent over by the force of the current. That December, Brittin died. 

The partners who picked up the contract spent much of the winter of 1822 searching for a convenient source of suitable building material — stone that was durable, easy to work, and that could be quarried in blocks large enough to withstand the force of the river’s annual floods. They found this durable material, or so they thought, at the bottom of the Genesee River gorge: a layer of red Medina sandstone. 

Most of the stone used to build the aqueduct would come from here. After being cut from the quarry, the large red blocks, from two to five feet thick and weighing several tons apiece, were somehow hauled to the brink of the gorge — a near-vertical ascent of almost 200 feet. Or perhaps they were floated downstream to Hanford’s Landing, where skids had been built to convey heavy items between the top of the gorge and the water’s edge. Either way, the blocks then would have been hauled by ox-drawn sled to the aqueduct site three miles away.

In all, more than 13,500 cubic yards of rock would be used to build the aqueduct, enough to fill a football field with a stack of stone blocks six feet high. As the stones slowly piled up on the east and west banks of the river, workers used black powder to blast away the shelves of the Upper Falls that were in the way.

Much of the quarrying and blasting — the most difficult and dangerous work — was done by convicted criminals from the new state prison at Auburn.

Stone construction is an ancient art; the methods used by the aqueduct builders would have hardly changed for thousands of years. First, the rough blocks were cut and dressed by skilled masons, who took particular care to fashion the wedge-shaped voussoirs to precisely fit into each arch. Then the heavy blocks were transported up to four hundred feet out over the riverbed and delicately lowered into place. Tolerances were measured in fractions of an inch. Aside from the animal teams used to haul the stones to the site, the work was entirely powered by human effort.

They worked quickly, setting the abutments and piers firmly into the rocky bed of the river and erecting the nine main arches, each of which took only a few days to complete. By the end of 1822 all of the arches and the walls between them were finished.

The water table, parapets, pilasters, and coping were assembled from enormous slabs of gray Cayuga County limestone, delivered by way of the partially completed canal from quarries sixty miles away. The aqueduct was finished by September 1823. It opened amid a shower of toasts the following month.

Erie Canal engineer David Bates described the completed work in the Rochester Telegraph:

“This stupendous fabric, which forms a prominent link in the great chain of our inland com­munication, is built on one of the rifts which compose a part of the extensive falls of the Genesee river. 

“The Aqueduct, from the eastern extremity of its parapet walls to its western termination, is 804 feet long, and is built on eleven arches; one [on the east side] of twenty-six feet chord, under which passes the water necessary for a number of important flouring mills, &c., nine of fifty feet chord, and one on the west side of the river of thirty feet chord, under which passes water for a number of flouring mills and other hydraulic establishments. . . . 

“The structure is founded on solid rock, in which nitches [sic] were cut to found the piers, which are thirty-six feet long and ten feet wide, including at each end a pedestal and dome, out of which rises a pilaster. The height of the piers is about four and an half feet; the rise of the arch eleven feet; its thickness at the foot three feet; at the apex, two and an half feet. The parapet walls or sides of the trunk, are five and an half feet high, including the coping, which is so constructed as to form a capital to tile whole trunk. The whole of this immense building is of cut stone; many of them, particularly the piers, of very great size. . . .

“On the north wall, which is of sufficient thickness for the towing path, is an elegant iron railing; and at the west end the whole is terminated by a highway and towing-path bridge of the most solid and elegant workmanship.”¹

Alas, the aqueduct’s flaws would soon become apparent. They were several, all serious.

First, integrating the existing channel of Elisha Johnson’s north-south millrace into the east-west alignment of the canal had resulted in a ninety-degree turn at the aqueduct’s eastern end that would snarl traffic and prove hazardous for large boats.

Second, the seventeen-foot width of the aqueduct waterway meant that canal traffic across the river would be one-way. Eastbound boats would have to wait for westbound boats, and vice-versa. Rochester was a busy canal port. Basins near both ends of the aqueduct would have been crowded with passenger and freight traffic. As much as any other feature of the canal, the aqueduct’s narrow width would create endless bottlenecks and fistfights among canal-boat bullies.

The final insult: Not only was the aqueduct the wrong size and possibly built in the wrong place, it leaked. This may have been partly due to its rapid and probably substandard construction. But the main culprit was the red Medina sandstone of which it was built, a poor choice of building material that turned out to be porous. The aqueduct began to crumble as Rochester’s yearly freeze-thaw cycle broke up the stones and the water lime that filled the gaps between them.

By the 1830s engineers began to draw up contingency plans in case the aqueduct failed completely. Its replacement, finished in 1842, stands to this day: a testament to professional engineering, quality workmanship, and the tough limestone of which it is made.

Rebuilding the aqueduct

You may have guessed by now that the construction of the first Rochester aqueduct will be the subject of my next landscape.

All of my images are based as much as possible on original research, but I realized early on that this one would be in a league of its own. There were many stories to follow: The construction of the aqueduct, the founding and early growth of Rochester, and the development of the flour milling industry, to name just a few. Following these stories took a few years and involved several trips across New York state to visit libraries, historical societies, and archives. Many hours were spent online going through newspapers, property deeds, state prison records, and period textbooks and treatises on carpentry, masonry construction, and civil engineering.

I’m planning to post more frequently as work on the landscape continues. Brief historical narratives will fill out the broad overview given here and will alternate with updates on the image itself.

If you haven’t already, please go back and read “There for the Taking,” “On the Brink,” and “Over the River.” These establish some historical context and set the stage. If you like, you can use the form on this website’s home page to subscribe to future posts.

The Genesee River is the star of the show when it comes to the early history of Rochester. All the other players come and go, but the river is always there.

Rising in the northern highlands of Pennsylvania, the Genesee drops some 2,000 feet on its way to Lake Ontario. Much of the descent occurs over two sets of magnificent waterfalls, one in Letchworth State Park, the other in downtown Rochester. It is named after the Seneca word for the surrounding landscape, often translated as “beautiful valley.” But the Seneca themselves from long familiarity and use had many names for the river. One was particularly appropriate — “river of many falls.”¹

“They call this River Casconchiagon,” wrote the Jesuit priest and explorer Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix in a letter home to France in May 1721. He had reached an outpost on the Niagara River and met “M. de Joncaire, Captain in the Troops of New France,” who gave him this first-person account of the river, which lay some distance to the east:

“Two Leagues from its Mouth, we are stopped by a Fall which appears to be sixty Feet high, and one hundred and forty Yards wide. A Musket Shot higher, we find a second of the same Width, but not so high by two thirds. Half a League further, a third, one hundred Feet high, good Measure, and two hundred yards wide. After this, we meet with several Torrents; and after having sailed fifty Leagues further, we perceive a fourth fall, every way equal to the third.”

The good Father Charlevoix, who must have paddled past the river on his voyage west, ruefully wrote that he would have visited it himself if only he “had been sooner informed of its Singularity.”²

A hundred acres and a waterfall

The Genesee Country would be opened to white settlement within a couple of generations of Charlevoix’s visit. During the American Revolution the indigenous occupants, the Senecas, were defeated by the Continental soldiers of General John Sullivan, their fields and villages laid to waste. Afterward, when those soldiers returned home, their accounts of the fertile country to the west caught the ears of speculators eager to make another kind of killing.

A group of investors led by Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham in 1788 purchased the preemption rights to western New York, allowing them to negotiate with the Senecas who, in principal, still held title to the soil.

The Senecas, unwilling to part with all of their territory, sold everything east of the Genesee, about 2.6 million acres, for $5,000 or a little more than five cents an acre. In a concession to Phelps they included a diagonally shaped tract west of the river, about twelve miles by twenty-four, for use as a “mill lot.” In return, Phelps promised to establish a sawmill and gristmill to serve native inhabitants and white settlers alike.³

An Indian trader named Ebenezer Allan agreed to operate the mills, and Phelps sold or gave to him a smaller tract of one hundred acres on which to build them.

Allan’s tract was adjacent to a stretch of rocky ledges and rapids known as the Upper Falls, so named because they were the first in a series of four cataracts over which the Genesee River tumbled on its way to Lake Ontario. The Upper Falls dropped a mere 14 feet – nothing compared to the mighty 96-foot-high Middle Falls a half-mile downstream. If you were to visit downtown Rochester today you would find no sign of them. But in the early 19th century the power they could generate was sufficient to drive many mills and factories.⁴

Allan turned out to be a poor millwright. His crudely constructed mills were inefficient and inaccessible to early settlers, and in 1792 he sold the falls tract and moved away. The tract passed through several hands before being contracted for purchase in 1803 by Nathaniel Rochester, William Fitzhugh, and Charles Carroll, three Maryland businessmen visiting on a tip from a local land agent. Impressed with the tract’s potential, they signed a contract, agreeing to buy the hundred acres for $1,750 to be paid in five annual installments.⁵

It was a cold-eyed real-estate investment that may have been underwritten in part by Rochester’s slave-trading business back home.⁶

“A nest egg for Posterity”

At first, none of the three partners was willing to relocate to the new property. Rochester established a large farm, complete with gristmill, sawmill, and paper mill, at Dansville, about 40 miles south. Carroll and Fitzhugh remained in Maryland, leaving to him the hands-on management of their “estate.”

In the late summer of 1811 Rochester surveyed the purchase, plotting it out as a simple grid. He envisioned a mercantile future for his “paper city” and omitted a town square and located property reserved for civic functions (such as a future courthouse) away from the community center. That space instead was filled with narrow, high-priced lots to encourage commercial use.⁷

All was done in consultation with Carroll and Fitzhugh. In a long, advice-filled missive to Rochester, Carroll urged him to hold back any property suitable for water-powered industry: “We perfectly accord with you in sentiment as to the advantage of laying out a Town & selling building lots . . . & this you are fully authorized to do, but by no means to sell any ground that can in any possible manner or shape injure or interfere with any scites [sic] or situations for water works.”⁸

Heeding Carroll’s words, Rochester reserved a large undivided parcel adjacent to the Upper Falls that could accommodate several mills and warehouses. He named it, simply, “Mill Yard.”

Nothing “should induce us to divest ourselves of the fee in any part of that Property,” Carroll had emphasized. “We hold it as a nest egg for Posterity . . . & scarcely any given sum would weigh with me one moment to divide or part with it.”⁹

For the three partners, this was the money lot.

“Their destroying attention”

The Hundred Acre Tract plays an outsize role in the popular history of Rochester. As the village and then city prospered and grew over the course of the 19th century — and it did, spectacularly — the rough outlines of its early years would be worn smooth by the fading memories of its original settlers and their children. But the fact is that for years after its establishment Rochesterville persisted as a remote, rattlesnake-infested foothold in the wilderness, virtually inaccessible to overland travelers. In more ways than one, it was a community on the brink.

The little settlement’s isolation was eased somewhat in 1812 when a wooden bridge was built across the river along Buffalo Street, its main thoroughfare — just in time for the outbreak of hostilities along the Niagara Frontier.

War with Great Britain commenced with much fanfare and bluster that June with a declaration of war by Congress and an invasion of Upper Canada. The campaign, doomed by poor planning and incompetent leadership, drew to a close in December 1813 with American General George McClure penned up in Fort George on the Canadian side of the Niagara River. The British forces closing in included disciplined regulars who had long experience fighting on the Continent and elsewhere for the Empire. McClure, who could muster only about 100 raw United States regulars and Canadian volunteers, made the reasonable decision to retreat to the American side of the river. But before departing he gave the order to burn the nearby village of Newark (now Niagara-on-the-Lake) to the ground, a criminal act that served no purpose and stranded the village’s inhabitants, mostly women and children, in the freezing cold and snow.¹⁰

Enraged, the British pursued the Americans across the river and with a ruthless bayonet attack captured Fort Niagara. They then turned south and in retaliation for the immolation of Newark burned the settlements of Lewiston, Youngstown, Manchester (Niagara Falls), Black Rock, and Buffalo, and many isolated homesteads besides.¹¹

The devastation — and fear of the British army’s Native American allies — sent refugees streaming east toward the Genesee River.

“The sufferings of the unfortunate people about Buffaloe [sic] excite the sympathy of all who have heard them,” wrote Fitzhugh to Rochester in early February 1814. “It would seem if the war should continue that every feeling of Humanity would be put to sleep.”¹²

That spring the settlers of Rochesterville found themselves under attack — or so they thought — when a British squadron unexpectedly appeared off the mouth of the Genesee River. According to a later account “all the male inhabitants of the village, capable of bearing arms (being 33), turned out with the militia of the neighboring towns,” to prevent a landing. But the village’s remoteness from the lake and a lack of satisfactory targets gave the British little incentive to attempt one. After a desultory volley or two the commander, Sir James Yeo, sailed off.¹³

In other words, Rochesterville likely was spared the fate of the Niagara Frontier because it was still in such a backward state — a detail that was not lost on Rochester and his partners.

“I observed by way of the eastern papers that the Enemy had been at no great distance from our Mill Seat at Genesee Falls,” noted Fitzhugh. “It is well perhaps the village was not improved with mills [and other] buildings which might have claimed their destroying attention.”¹⁴

“They crossed the river yesterday”

The treaty of Ghent was signed at the end of 1814 and within a few weeks hostilities sputtered to a close. By then a few more tentative steps had been taken at the Hundred Acre Tract. A sawmill was raised in 1813, followed the next year by the Red Mill, the tract’s first gristmill since Allan’s failed effort twenty years before.

In the meantime, reports began to filter in from Albany about a new and massive state project. The details were far from certain, but the proposed “monstrous canal,” in Fitzhugh’s words, which would connect the waters of Lake Erie with the Hudson River, had the potential to change everything. “What distance will the canal run from our mill seat?” he asked. “Not far I think by the direction it takes upon the map.”¹⁵

Rochester’s reply came a few weeks later: “The route for the Canal . . . crosses the Genesee River on our Land immediately above the falls, about where we forded the River twelve years ago. The advantages that would result to the State of New York, and particularly to this western part of it would be incalculable if it can be accomplished.”¹⁶

Planning for the canal had started much earlier, but out of necessity it had been set aside during the war. With the arrival of peace it could resume in earnest. After much political wrangling a skeptical state legislature in April 1816 appointed a board of canal commissioners and instructed them to undertake a new set of surveys. The commissioners wasted no time. James Geddes, who led the survey team east from Tonawanda Creek near Buffalo, was soon approaching the Genesee River.

Hervey Ely, one of the builders of the Red Mill, broke the news to Nathaniel Rochester in a postscript to a letter written July 30, 1816: “P.S. The surveyors for the great Canal are now here, they crossed the river yesterday about 100 yards above the head of the race.”¹⁷

Once again the Genesee River was front and center. It wasn’t finished with Rochesterville. Not by a long shot.