The Canalway Trail in Fort Plain is part of a public trail network that parallels the New York State Canal System’s four historic waterways—the Erie, Champlain, Oswego, and Cayuga-Seneca Canals—which together span 524 miles across New York State and link 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 system offers hundreds of miles for walking, bicycling, cross country skiing, and other recreation, and when completed will extend more than 500 miles through many canal communities. At Fort Plain, the Erie Canal’s evolution can be seen in the locks and surrounding landscape: the first locks were carefully built of stone and measured 15 feet wide by 90 feet long, while the modern concrete lock, completed during early 20th-century modernization, is nearly 45 feet wide and 300 feet long, with electric motors opening metal gates weighing more than 20 tons. The area around the locks also changed, as locktenders’ homes, sheds, barns, and canal stores gave way to power houses, control stands, and electric cabinets. In the early 20th century, modernization after 1908 shifted the canal into the Mohawk River, abandoning and filling much of the old canal at Fort Plain, though some portions remain visible nearby. In the 19th century, the canal crossed rivers, creeks, and ravines by aqueducts, including one at Fort Plain, structures admired by travelers and artists such as Thomas Cole, who called them the “castles of the United States.” Completed in 1825 and repeatedly enlarged, the canal changed further with the rise of self-propelled boats, and the Erie Barge Canal, approved in 1903 and finished 15 years later, could carry barges of 3,000 tons, 100 times the capacity of canal boats from the 1820s. During construction of the Erie Barge Canal, engineers also designed movable dams to control river water for navigation, raising them in winter so the river could resume its natural course. The modernization also brought debate over construction materials, as stonecutters and masons opposed the use of concrete, but after inspection of existing concrete works and a cost finding that stone would add 16 million dollars, the state chose concrete.