Built in 1822 of local limestone, the Little Falls Aqueduct carried water and canal boats across the Mohawk River, linking the original Erie Canal to a boat basin on the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company canal northeast of Canal Place and providing the water connection long sought by merchants in Little Falls on the river’s north side. The 214-foot structure crossed the river in a single seventy-foot arch with smaller arches at either end, containing a sixteen-foot-wide waterway four feet deep and a wooden towpath along one side. It was deepened when the Erie Canal was enlarged in the 1840s, but it proved difficult to maintain and was used less often as businesses beside the canal and railroad came to dominate the north shore. By 1881 it was abandoned and drained, the northern stone arch was dynamited in 1891 for expansion of the Victor Knitting Mills and Paper Box Factory, the southern arch collapsed after 1928, and the central arch stood until high waters brought it down in 1993, more than a century after its last maintenance. The Little Falls Aqueduct was the best example of the aqueducts built for the original Erie Canal.