Less than a century ago, what is now a park was the busy Erie Canal at Jordan, a principal artery of commerce. The nearby stone aqueduct carried the mule towpath, while canal barges floated in an adjacent seven-foot-deep wooden trough supported by large stone piers. Within a decade of the Erie Canal's opening in 1825, the canal had become obsolete and needed a larger channel. At Jordan, enlargement was complicated because the land west of town and east of Camillus sloped downhill, creating a summit that was difficult to supply with water and that required locks to raise barges to its level. The entire summit was lowered by eleven feet as a partial remedy, but the Depression of 1842 and the Stop and Tax law ended construction, leaving the Jordan section unfinished until it was completed in 1845 by presenting the last work as a repair. In later canal life, mules rather than horses were used to tow boats because they were smarter, more physically stable, obedient, and even-tempered, and canallers cared for them closely, sometimes keeping stables for them on the boats. Teams of three mules usually pulled a canal barge during a six-hour shift, guided by a driver called a hoggee, who fed and groomed the animals and earned upwards of two dollars a month.