A Metaphor for Change

Before 1917, Lock 52 in Port Byron stood amid a bustling canal waterfront where dozens of boats passed through, canal boats were built and repaired at Tanner's Dry Dock, lodgers dined at the Erie House, and captains collected orders from the Lock 52 Grocery. The canal had transformed Port Byron from a hamlet into a prosperous village with factories, mills, hotels, and restaurants, but after the Auburn branch of the New York Central Railroad opened in 1841, other villages grew at Port Byron's expense, and the decline deepened with the old canal's closure in 1918 and with competition from automobiles and trucks that favored cities such as Auburn and Syracuse. Today Port Byron is a residential community with a notable past, including its connection to Brigham Young, who lived there for several years in the 1820s, earned a living painting furniture and canal boats, carding wool, and doing carpentry, married Miriam Works in 1824, and had a daughter in 1825 before the family moved to Mendon in 1829. The house where Brigham and Miriam lived still stands on South Street. Young later built on the foundation begun by Joseph Smith and his Book of Mormon and established a commonwealth in the Utah desert where his followers could live in peace; by the time he died in 1877, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which he helped to found, had become a uniquely American religion. The development of the Mormon Church formed part of the Second Great Awakening centered in western New York, a broad religious movement that sought to redefine religion and spirituality for a new mercantile and industrial America taking shape in large part because of the Erie Canal, as liberal Protestantism was invigorated by social concerns and new evangelicalisms like Mormonism also flourished.

Port Byron, New York · United States