A trip to the Erie Canal Museum, Syracuse

The New York Traveler blog has an interesting two-part blog entry about a visit to the Erie Canal Museum:

Part One

Part Two

From a distance I find these New England canals fascinating - quite characterful and 'English' in their sense of heritage and history.  Perhaps because, like the British canals, they mostly weren't upgraded and enlarged and modernised in the way the European continental ones were.   

Instead, they were mostly lost - or at least, chunks of them were.  Ghosts and fossils are always far more interesting than living descendants, which is why to this day children prefer dinosaurs to birds.

I was particularly intrigued by the Weighlock Building, which actually weighed the boats with their cargo to calculate the tolls. 

(As distinct from the British weighing machines, such as at Stoke Bruerne Waterways Museum, which merely weighed the empty boat when new, and then calculated the displacement with a stick when the boat was loaded).

Comments

[Mrs. Mecomber]

Thank you for linking to my blog posts. What an interesting blog you have here! I will have a wonderful time, poking around your posts!