After his election as Governor of New York in 1817, DeWitt Clinton won legislative funding for the Erie Canal, completed in 1825 as a 363-mile waterway forty feet wide and four feet deep with eighty-three locks and a ten-foot towpath for animals pulling barges. The canal was enlarged twice, but by the early 1900s engineers chose to build a new canal for larger ocean-going vessels by dredging the Mohawk and Tonawanda Rivers and shallow areas in Lakes Oneida and Onondaga to incorporate those waterways into the route. Work on the New York State Barge Canal began in 1905 and it opened in 1918. Under state contract 132, awarded to Lupfer and Remick of Buffalo, three concrete towers for Lake Oneida were begun in 1916: one at Brewerton to mark the junction of the lake’s western end with the Oneida River, one at Verona Beach to mark the entrance to Wood Creek canal from the lake’s eastern end, and one on Frenchman’s Island to mark islands in the southwestern part of the lake. Bids were opened on October 3, 1916, construction started on October 30, and by August 1917 the Brewerton lighthouse was substantially complete; the final account was approved on April 10, 1918. Built in 1916–17 as part of this statewide canal improvement, the eighty-foot Brewerton Rear-Range Lighthouse remains one of only three lighthouses on the New York State Canal System and is still used by westbound boaters leaving Oneida Lake for the Oneida River channel, lining its beacon with a similar beacon on the U.S. Route 11 bridge for navigation.