The Canalway Trail follows New York State's Canal System, a four-waterway network of the Erie, Champlain, Oswego, and Cayuga-Seneca canals stretching 524 miles across the state and linking the Hudson River with Lake Champlain, Lake Ontario, the Finger Lakes, the Niagara River, and Lake Erie. Built through cooperation among the New York State Canal Corporation, volunteers, local governments, and federal and state agencies, the trail system offers hundreds of miles of routes and parks for walking, bicycling, cross-country skiing, and other recreation, and when completed was planned to extend more than 500 miles through many canal communities. At Mindenville, Lock 16 was constructed in 1907-08 as one of 57 new locks created in the early 20th century to join four existing canals into a single network; these concrete locks, nearly 45 feet wide and more than 300 feet long, used electrically operated steel gates weighing more than 20 tons. Completed in 1918 at a cost of $155 million, the Erie Barge Canal carried larger barges loaded with goods including grain, pulpwood, coal, apples, onions, potatoes, oil, bricks, and automobiles. The canal also faced recurring weaknesses and washouts, as in April 1878 when muskrats weakened the towpath and 510 feet of earth washed away, causing $53,000 in damage, provoking worker riots, and fueling political charges of graft; to detect such dangers, bankwatchers regularly walked the towpath, and in western New York they still walked about seven miles a day looking for leaks. Since its completion in 1825, the Erie Canal was repeatedly enlarged and in the 20th century was even rerouted to use inland lakes and rivers; approved in 1903 and finished 15 years later, the modernized canal could handle barges carrying 3,000 tons of cargo, 100 times the capacity of canal boats of the 1820s, and the state chose concrete over stone for much of this work after engineers and accountants concluded stone would cost 16 million dollars more.