The Canalway Trail follows the New York State Canal System, a 524-mile network of the Erie, Champlain, Oswego, and Cayuga-Seneca canals linking the Hudson River with Lake Champlain, Lake Ontario, the Finger Lakes, the Niagara River, and Lake Erie, and was created for public use through cooperation among the New York State Canal Corporation, volunteers, local governments, and federal and state agencies. At Lock 51 in Elbridge, a scene that is quiet today was once a busy passage on the old Erie Canal, where until 1918 barges, excursion boats, and maintenance scows were towed by mule teams much as they had been since the 1820s. As freight competition grew in the late 19th century, state engineers built the larger State Barge Canal to carry greater tonnage by using rivers and other bodies of water where possible, but its route several miles north of Jordan bypassed the old canal and brought economic hardship to canal-dependent villages and businesses. Excursion steamers also traveled the Enlarged Erie Canal, providing cheap transportation for passengers, mail, and packaged goods, though they declined as railroads, trolleys, automobiles, and buses offered other forms of rapid transit. The steamer Walter McMullin long ran regularly between Jordan and Syracuse, where passengers and freight at Saul's Dock could transfer onward to places such as Utica, Rome, or Albany.