The Canalway Trail System follows the New York State Canal System, a network of four historic waterways—the Erie, Champlain, Oswego, and Cayuga-Seneca Canals—that stretches 524 miles across New York State and links the Hudson River with Lake Champlain, Lake Ontario, the Finger Lakes, the Niagara River, and Lake Erie. Created through cooperation among the New York State Canal Corporation, volunteers, local governments, and federal and state agencies, the trail network offers hundreds of miles for walking, bicycling, cross-country skiing, and other recreation, and when completed will extend more than 500 miles through many cities, towns, and villages. At Rochester, although the barge canal officially opened in May 1918, harbor facilities and terminal buildings south of the Court Street Dam were not finished until 1920, so the Enlarged Erie Canal through the city remained in use to provide access to the new barge canal, though only smaller boats of Enlarged Erie dimensions could use that segment. Because the Court Street Dam raised the barge canal three feet above the level of the Enlarged Erie west of Rochester south of Greece, a junction lock was built in 1918 to let freighters continue into the city along the Enlarged Erie Canal; it operated only until 1923. Unlike other locks in the area, it used the existing canal banks as the sides of the lock chamber, with new concrete walls at either end for the gates. The junction lock formed part of the Erie Canal’s larger evolution from the original 1825 canal known as Clinton’s Ditch, forty feet wide and four feet deep, to the Enlarged Erie, widened and straightened between 1836 and 1862 to seventy feet across at the top and seven feet deep, and finally to the barge canal, completed in 1918 to carry larger self-propelled vessels and still serving as an important waterway route linking the Hudson River and the Great Lakes.
