American Water - A Meditation on the Chenango Canal

[searcher]

American Water​

The circulatory system of the Empire State was once a maritime domain that cut through the hills. Shallow, straight, flat, never meandering except as made necessary by topographies of granite or cliffsides or gnarled wetlands and riverine chaos, our channels of murky water cut cleanly across pastures and timberlands and run straight through the centers of once-burgeoning villages and centers of commerce. Floating granaries, cedarwood scows, great barges and vessels gliding stoicly across the surface of hundreds of miles of canalwater all carried the spoils of an era of almost inconceivable commercial vigor. From one canal to the next, they arced downstream to old Gotham and to the wharves of Brooklyn — those cities whose adolescence still smiled wide across the bays and harbors with not a whiff of presumption or certainty for its future. Then, New York City's success was not a foregone conclusion nor a laurel on which it could rest in wrly placid luxury. Any possibility of ascending to world-wide status as a city was then something for which the whole state had to strive. This was the height of New York State's youthful days — the canal era.

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American Water

A Meditation on the Chenango Canal

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[Casey Jones]

Interesting survey of the canal, the history, the land. Anyone who's taken the time to explore that region - the Mohawk Valley area of New York State, or the Adirondack region where the author comes from - knows the breathtaking beauty.

It is a bloody tragedy that the state has fallen into such poor stewardship, that it is now a neo-feudal principality.