This is one of an occasional series. Some of the newspaper columns by Arch Merrill never made it to his series of books. This column is about the fateful Genesee Valley Canal.
The Canal That Once Linked Rochester and Olean
By Arch Merrill
Originally published: June 24, 1951
THE old Genesee Valley Canal is scarcely even a memory now.
Few can remember when the boats crawled along that ditch from Rochester to Olean and the horses and their “hogee” drivers trudged its 118 miles of towpath.
For 73 years have gone since the horn of the last boatman was beard on the waterway that was born of the pioneers’ dreams of linking the Erie Canal with the Allegheny River and ultimately with the Gulf of Mexico.
But there still linger in Western New York a few tangible remains of the canal that York State took 20 years to dig and then abandoned after two decades of unprofitable operation.
Some of those remains are not far from Rochester and I doubt if their presence is generally known.
Go a half mile down the dirt road that leads west from Scottsville Rd. just south of the imposing brick Twelve Horse* stables on the Dumpling Hill estate of Louis A. Wehle, cross the Pennsylvania track and along them a few yards to the north, you come upon ancient locks of the Genesee Valley Canal.
The stone masonry is as staunch as when it was laid there by hand labor 113 years ago. But right now the locks are pretty well concealed by underbrush and trees are growing in the old ditch which contains a few inches of seepage water.
NOW JUST AN OLD DITCH – This picture, taken about 1900, shows lock of the abandoned Genesee Valley Canal near Dumpling Hill as it looked then, already out of use more than 20 years. This part of canal was completed by 1840. Picture was lent to Arch Merrill by Gerald Kindelin, who as a boy lived in house overlooking lock.
I discovered the locks, thanks to Gerald Kindelin of 275 Norwood Ave., who provided the old picture that appears on this page. It was taken around the turn of the century when Kindelin was a boy and lived with his family in the farmhouse that overlooked the locks, then already long abandoned. The homestead burned long ago and the barns, too, are gone. But the old stone locks have not changed. They defy the march of time.
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THE GENESEE COUNTRY began agitating for its canal in 1824, even before the Erie Canal, New York’s “Ditch of Destiny,” was completed.
The region desperately needed a transportation outlet” for its products, notably the wheat of the Genesee Valley and the lumber of the Southern Tier. The nearest and most remunerative markets were Baltimore and Montreal, neither easily accessible. The Genesee River was navigable only for rafts and flat boats and then only part of the year, although a steamboat did operate in the 1820s between Geneseo and the Rochester Rapids—but only for two seasons. Besides, the waterfalls at Rochester and at Portage were unsurmountable barriers to full-scale navigation of the river.
The opening of the Erie Canal was to bring nearer the markets of Albany and New York but the nearest point on the Clinton Ditch was still a considerable wagon haul from most Genesee County communities.
So there appeared in the Livingston Register in June of 1825 a call for a public meeting in Geneseo “for citizens of Monroe, Livingston, Allegany, Cattaraugus and Steuben counties who feel interested in the formation of a canal along the valley of the Genesee and Canaseraga . . . from Genesee River to some point on the Allegheny River.”
Among the signers of the call were such leading men as Philip Church, the father of Allegany County; Daniel Fitzhugh and William H. Spencer of the Valley gentry and Jonathan Child, destined to become first mayor of Rochester.
That meeting was held and so were many others, much enthusiasm was manifested, memorials were sent to the Legislature urging the canal but nothing was done by the state until 1834 when preliminary surveys were made. They set the cost of the project at a little more than two million dollars. That figure soon was revised to five million. The canal when completed cost a total of six millions.
The plan, when authorized, called for a canal between Rochester and Olean, to link the Erie Canal with the Allegheny. In the background was a more grandiose scheme, eventual widening and improvement of the Allegheny River so that shipments could be made via the Erie and Genesee Valley Canals and the Allegheny, the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers to the Gulf of Mexico. It was a dream that never came true.
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DIRT FLEW fast in the early stages of the Genesee canal project. By 1840 the stretch between Rochester and Mount Morris was completed. It ran through Scottsville, Fowlerville and Leicester. At Scottsville enterprising settlers in 1836 had dug their own canal, a short one connecting mills on the Oatka with the Genesee, with a lock at the junction of the two streams. It was taken over by the Genesee Valley Canal.
Building of the canal brought gala celebrations in the towns on its banks. It also solved an unemployment problem and workmen flocked into the region, some of them recent arrivals from Ireland. There was a brief and futile strike against the prevailing wage scale of 75 cents a day for working from sunup to sundown.
By 1841 the 4-mile stretch between Mount Morris and Shakers Settlement and the branch from Mount Morris to Dansville were completed.
But the canal digging moved slowly in the southern reaches. Work was suspended at times by economy-minded state governments. It took 10 years to build the 36-mile link from Shaken to Oramel, crossing the Genesee at Squawkic Hill, then winding south to Nunda, Portageville, Fillmore, Houghton, Caneadea, and Oramel.
The rock-bound hilly terrain between Nunda and Portageville presented formidable engineering difficulties.
Travel the highway between those two villages today, observe “The Deep Cut” south of Nunda that is now the road bed of the Pennsy and marvel. For that was dag by hand labor. There were no steam shovels in the 1830s and ’40s. The earth and rock, blasted out by hand drills and black powder, was removed by horse scrapers and in the leather aprons of the workers.
When the canal builders came to the mountainous ridge over the river north of Portageville, an attempt was made to dig a tunnel 1,800 feet long, 27 feet high and 20 feet wide. Sliding rock forced abandonment of the scheme after the state had sunk a quarter of a million dollars in the hole in the hillside. That dark cave is then today, a symbol of an engineering defeat of long ago.
But the builders triumphed in pinning the canal to the side of the cliff above the river and winding under the famous High Bridge at Portage Falls, the canal recrossed the Genesee on a wooden aqueduct, supported by stone piers.
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CARGOES INSURED reads this 1860 advertising card of the New York and Genesee Valley Canal Line. This was lent by Mrs. Sally Patchin of Wayland. Canal finally was completed from Rochester to Olean in 1856, closed in 1878.
IT WAS NOT until 1856 that the ditch was completed to Olean Basin, via Belfast, Rockville and Cuba, through mighty hills. .The next year the state authorized a 6-mile extension to Mill Grove Pond, which connected directly with the Allegheny River. It never was completed and the Valley Canal never actually tapped Allegheny water.
Red figures spattered the ledgers of the canal almost from Its belt never fulfilled the expectations of ha builders. Its best year was 1854 when nearly 3,000 boats cleared Rochester for the South and a total of 5,345 boats passed through the lacks at Dumpling Hill.
That same year of 1854 the Iron Horse came to challenge the waterway and to sound its eventual doom. The Genesee Valley Railroad completed its line from Rochester to Avon. The tracks were extended later to Mount Morris and eventually to Dansville. The competition was too rugged for the slow-moving canal boats. The waterway fell into disuse, disrepair and disfavor and in September, 1878, it was officially declared abandoned.
In 1880 the state sold the right of way of the canal that had cost it six million dollars to dig, to the Rochester & Genesee Valley Canal Railroad for $11,400. The railroad utilized the old canal bed much of the way to Olean. Now the Rochester Olean branch of the Pennsylvania system, it runs only freight trains where once the red excursion cars carried thousands to Portage Falls.
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FINANCIALLY the Genesee Valley Canal was a failure. But it served the pioneers in a critical time and its fully painted passenger packet boats brought life and color to the ports it touched. It boomed some of them commercially, too.
Oramel, in its day the queen of the canal towns, is a drowsy hamlet today. But the canal gave the spark of life to Fillmore, which now is the liveliest of the Northern Allegany villages. And Houghton, which has the distinction of being one of the few college towns in America where neither tobacco or alcoholics are sold, was in Genesee Valley Canal days called Jockey Street because of the horse races there.
A sparkling little lake in the hills that bears the name of the nearby village of Cuba is a child of the canal. It is a man-made lake, once known as the second largest artificial lake in the world. It was built to feed the Genesee Valley Canal when it was found that the lockage through the southern hills used a tremendous amount of water. The lake is still there, lined with Summer cottages and a popular resort for the neighborhood.
The Rapids, the area around the junction of Brooks and Plymouth Aves. is now a part of the 19th Ward of Rochester. In the heyday of the Valley Canal it was a rough place. There were many fights and a murder or two in its grog shops. At the Rapids lived Ben Streeter, the “Rochester Canal Bully,” who once fought a one-hour, one-round battle in the Reynolds Arcade with the “Bully of Buffalo” and licked him.
But all that is folklore now and the Genesee valley Canal is now history. There remain the pretty like canal-born lake in the green hills, the “Deep Cut” that sweating men scooped out by hand, the dismal hole in the hillside of Portageville and here and there the sturdy old locks of stone.