Ghosts Of The Past: The Chemung Canal

[TTL News 308]

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It might not occur to someone driving on Route 14 south from Watkins Glen, through Montour Falls, Millport, Pine Valley, Horseheads and then Elmira, that this picturesque byway was once an important artery of commerce. Route 14 follows the path of the Chemung Canal, which, in its heyday from 1833 to the late 1870s, changed the landscape and economy of the area, and opened this part of the Finger Lakes Region to the outside world.

The Chemung Canal connected Seneca Lake at Watkins Glen to the Chemung River in Elmira, with a navigable feeder canal that stretched from Horseheads to Corning. By joining the Erie Canal System with Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River Watershed, it opened a portal to trade and business that transformed the local communities on its path into boomtowns.

Today, canal boats seem impossibly quaint and the epitome of unhurried travel, but the canal system was the Internet of its time. The roads then were rough and unreliable and subject to impassability due to weather, making shipping and travel difficult and expensive. Many people in the Finger Lakes area depended on the infrequent visits of traveling peddlers to buy the things they couldn’t make themselves.

 

Read the rest here.

[TTL News 308]

Here's a couple pics of the canal in Elmira: