The Glens Falls Feeder Canal was placed on the State and National Registers of Historical Places in 1985. The original wooden locks on the Feeder Canal were replaced with hammer-dressed limestone locks by 1845. Stones for the five combines, locks 6 through 10, were delivered by canal boat from Kingsbury quarries. Each lock was 100 feet long and 15 feet wide and lifted or lowered a canal boat about 11 feet, for a total drop of 55 feet. Lock tenders worked 24 hours a day to operate the gates and lock boats through. It took 15 minutes for a boat to pass through one lock and 1 hour and 10 minutes to pass through the entire flight at the five combines. At the first wooden locks on the canal, the flow of water to the Champlain Canal stopped whenever the gates closed, causing a shortage of water in the canal. The 1840s stone lock system, the present five-combined structure, was designed with an adjacent sluice to feed water continuously around the locks. The first sluice at the five combines was an underground stone aqueduct visible through the grill across the lock. It used the timber foundation of the original wooden combined locks as a base for arched stone chambers. The sluice ran almost parallel to the locks. The underground aqueduct was 400 feet long, with an 11-foot drop to a lower chamber every 100 feet. A fifth 100-foot section had breakers across it to slow the water as it returned to the surface at canal level. The underground sluice leaked so badly that it had to be replaced in less than 20 years.

Photo: Steve Stoessel

Photo: Steve Stoessel