The Canalway Trail System offers hundreds of miles of scenic trails and numerous parks for walking, bicycling, cross country skiing, and other recreational activities along the New York State Canal System, whose four historic waterways—the Erie, Champlain, Oswego, and Cayuga-Seneca Canals—span 524 miles across New York State and link the Hudson River with Lake Champlain, Lake Ontario, the Finger Lakes, the Niagara River, and Lake Erie. Created through cooperative initiatives among the New York State Canal Corporation, volunteers, local governments, and federal and state agencies, the trail network was planned to extend more than 500 miles and connect numerous cities, towns, and villages along the canal system. Near Rochester, the Barge Canal took a route south of the 19th century Erie Canal and required excavation of the 2.5-mile Rochester “deep cut,” a trench 36 feet deep and 94 feet across through limestone. Drills and dynamite first loosened 1.5 million cubic yards of rock, which then had to be piled in the middle of the cut before removal. To handle this costly and time-consuming work, Frank Maselli designed the electrically powered “grab machine,” a 428-foot bridge conveyor with 90-foot-high trusses that traveled the canal line scooping broken rock to the north side; in service by 1906, it completed the contract by 1910, ahead of schedule. Canal boating itself was heavy, tedious, back-breaking work carried on from April to December, and many married boat owners brought their families with them. Richard Garrity, who grew up on a canal boat with six siblings, recalled his mother’s labor cooking, cleaning, washing clothes by hand, heating water, ironing on a wood stove, caring for children, and feeding family and crew in cramped quarters that by 1914 had been expanded with additional double bunks to sleep eight people.
