The Canalway Trail follows the New York State Canal System’s four historic waterways—the Erie, Champlain, Oswego, and Cayuga-Seneca Canals—across 524 miles linking the Hudson River with Lake Champlain, Lake Ontario, the Finger Lakes, the Niagara River, and Lake Erie, and cooperative work by the New York State Canal Corporation, volunteers, local governments, and federal and state agencies has created a broad public trail network for recreation. In Fultonville, the Erie Canal opened inexpensive access to market for inland raw materials, farm products, coal, and manufactured goods, helping turn New York into an economic giant while driving later efforts to enlarge and modernize the canal system. Thomas Robinson and Myndert Starin anticipated that opportunity by buying land in 1822 and building a store, flour mill, distillery, paper mill, saw mill, textile mill, and blacksmith shop with nail factory, so that when the canal opened in 1825 Fultonville quickly became a busy port lined with mills, factories, stores, and coal yards, with heavy boat traffic crowding the waterway. Although railroads had become far faster by 1843, carrying passengers 526 miles from the Hudson River through the Mohawk Valley to Lake Erie in 25 hours while canal travel took days in cramped shared quarters, some mourned the loss of the canal’s slower scenery and leisure, as James Fenimore Cooper wrote in 1851. Each October the canal season ended as captains unloaded final cargoes and moved to basins near home, workers drained the canal and dismantled wooden aqueducts to reduce winter damage, stores received no more canal shipments until April or May, and in winter skaters used the frozen residue of water while some residents cut ice for warmer months.