CELEBRATING ‘ CLINTON’S DITCH’

First phase of Erie Canal exhibit opens Saturday at State Museum

ALBANY, N. Y. » The New York State Museum will open the first phase of a new exhibit honoring the bicentennial of the Erie Canal on Saturday.

Enterprising Waters: New York’s Erie Canal will be on display through Oct. 20, 2019, featuring artifacts, images, posters and documents from the collections of the State Museum, State Archives, State Library and cultural institutions across the state.

The first phase of the exhibition explores the circumstances that led to building the canal, its construction and the famous “wedding of the waters” that marked the opening of the completed canal in 1825. The exhibit features a gigantic canal warehouse windlass with a wooden wheel measuring 14 feet in diameter from the Herkimer County village of Mohawk. The pulley mechanism could easily lift and lower heavy cargo from both sides of a warehouse along the canal with only one or two men.

The second phase of the exhibition will open in 2018 and explore life on the canal, its growth and legacy and the barge canal still in use today.

“We’re pleased to open the first phase of Enterprising Waters: New York’s Erie Canal at the State Museum,” said Deputy Commissioner of Cultural Education and State Museum Director Mark Schaming. “The Erie Canal helped solidify New York as the Empire State and greatly influenced the state and the

nation’s transportation, economics, immigration and trade in the 19th and 20th centuries,” said Mark Schaming, museum director and deputy commissioner of cultural education for the state Education Department, which oversees the museum. “As the legacy of the Erie Canal continues to today, this exhibition is an opportunity for visitors to learnabout this important chapter in New York’s history.”

The Erie Canal directed the course of New York and American history. When the canal opened in 1825, it unlocked the Western interior for trade and settlement, and made New York City the nation’s most powerful commercial center. As one of the largest publicworks projects in American history, the Erie Canal also inspired a nationwide transportation revolution. Thousands of people poured into New York to work on or along the canal, or just to pass through. Though the canal would eventually be superseded by the railroad, a heady mixture of innovation and determination, and the industrious seeking and creation of wealth, was cemented in the American character.

The State Museum, at 222Madison Ave., in the Empire State Plaza, is open from 9: 30 a. m. to 5 p. m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is free. For more information about the canal exhibit or other museum programs and events, call 518- 474- 5877 or visit www.nysm.nysed.gov.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM The windlass from a 19th century Herkimer County warehouse, used to load and unload ships along the Erie Canal, is the centerpiece of a new exhibit at the New York State Museum in Albany, Enterprising Waters: New York's Erie Canal, that opens Saturday.

The first shovel of dirt for the Erie Canal was ceremoniously overturned outside of Rome on July 4, 1817, as portrayed in Ground- Breaking Ceremony, a 1960painting by J. Erwin Porter.

NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM One of two capstones ceremoniously placed Aug. 24, 1825, to mark completion of the Lockport flight of the Erie Canal is on display as part of a new exhibit at the New York State Museum marking the bicentennial of the historic waterway.