Fort Plain has long been a center of Mohawk Valley life and commerce, first settled by Mohawk Indians and later by Palatine Germans who began arriving in the 1700s. The village takes its name from a hilltop fort built during the Revolutionary War. The Erie Canal, opened in 1825, spurred agricultural and industrial development in Fort Plain, where factories produced agricultural equipment, textiles, machinery, and furniture that were shipped on the canal. The canal originally ran through the center of town behind the shops on Canal Street, and Fort Plain’s main commercial street ran along its south bank, with many buildings having rear cargo doors for unloading goods directly from canal boats. Taverns and stores grew up near the locks to serve canal boat crews, including a grocery and tavern at Lock 32. A stone and timber aqueduct once carried the canal over Otsquago Creek, but after the canal was moved to the Mohawk River in 1916, its stonework was reused to support a highway bridge, and only the abutments survive after years of damaging floods. Between 1905 and 1918, the Mohawk River was canalized with locks and dams that allowed larger vessels to pass, and during the 1950s the New York Thruway was built on top of the old canal bed while the railroad bed came to support today’s cross-state Erie Canalway Trail. More broadly, the Erie Canal, running more than 350 miles between the Hudson River near Albany and Lake Erie at Buffalo, connected the Atlantic Ocean to the upper Great Lakes, raised and lowered boats more than 570 feet through its locks, opened the interior of North America, transformed New York into the Empire State, carried settlers and immigrants westward, and moved farm and factory products east to Atlantic markets; enlarged over time, it still operates as an active and historic waterway, joined by the Cayuga-Seneca, Oswego, and Champlain canals in a network of inland waterways across New York State.