Two original Erie Canal locks rediscovered

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COHOES, N.Y. -- In its 19th-century heyday, pioneers, immigrants and cargo swarmed the Erie Canal, a bustling gateway that opened up the country's heartland and the West. When the canal faded from prominence at the turn of the past century, a myth arose that it had been destroyed.

Armed with old maps and shovels, a group of scientists has set out to prove otherwise. Since 1999, their careful detective work has yielded promise: They have recovered two original canal locks and other remnants from when the man-made waterway expanded.

However, they face their greatest challenge when they try to unearth the canal's holy grail: the eastern terminus of the original 363-mile Erie, stretching from Albany to Buffalo.

"The beauty of the Erie Canal is that it's there," said F. Andrew Wolfe, an engineer at SUNY Institute of Technology in Utica. "It's a matter of finding it."

Mr. Wolfe and his colleague, Denis Foley, an anthropologist at Union College, Schenectady, hope that recovered artifacts will be a reference point to other buried structures from the canal that established New York City as the nation's leading port.

"They have put a flashlight on these sites that have long been neglected and forgotten, but that do tell about the heritage of the state," said Craig Williams, a senior historian at the New York State Museum in Albany.

During the summer this year, the duo dug down 13 feet in this former textile city just north of Albany and uncovered an intact foundation of Lock 37 and fragments of Lock 38 of the old canal. The original locks were numbered west to east starting in Rome, in central New York.

The discovery of a quoin post -- a wedgelike piece of stone where oak lock gates swung back and forth -- proved it was a canal lock, Mr. Foley said. The locks ushered mule-drawn boats through changes in water levels in the canal by opening the gates and flooding the chambers with water or letting the water out.

The limestone-topped locks were discovered in a cavernous tunnel that was later used for hydropower. Mr. Wolfe and Mr. Foley spent three months studying the locks, trying to answer why they were built on shale instead of clay and why there were feeder culverts to raise boats in the locks -- fixtures thought to exist only in Lockport, north of Buffalo.