Erie Canal in Little Falls
— a lock that lifts a boat forty feet at once.
Not only on a wall.
“Little Falls sits where the Mohawk River cuts a narrow gorge through the Adirondack foothills, and the canal has had to climb past it since the 1820s. The original Erie Canal used five locks stacked together here. The current Lock 17, finished in 1918, replaced them with a single chamber that lifts a boat 40.5 feet in one pass, the highest lift on the canal and once the highest in the world.
Erie Canal in Little Falls, on ceramic.
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The place, in three passes.
Little Falls is a city of about 4,700 people in Herkimer County, New York, set in the Mohawk Valley about thirty miles east of Utica. The Mohawk River drops sharply through a narrow gorge cut by glacial meltwater, and the Erie Canal has had to negotiate the same drop since the original channel opened in 1825. The current alignment carries the New York State Barge Canal, opened in 1918, which replaced the older towpath canal with a deeper river-channel route.
Lock 17 lifts a boat 40.5 feet in a single chamber, which was the greatest lift of any lock in the world when it opened in 1918. It remains the highest on the modern Erie Canal. The lock uses a guillotine gate at its lower end, raised vertically rather than swung open, which is unusual on the canal system. Above the lock, the canal widens into a long stillwater pool, with the river running close on the south bank through the Little Falls gorge.
The Little Falls gorge is cut through Precambrian gneiss, some of the oldest exposed bedrock in the eastern United States, with quartz dikes visible in the cliff faces above the river. The city's older mills and warehouses are built of the same local stone, dressed and laid in the second half of the nineteenth century when Little Falls was a center of cheese, paper, and knit-goods manufacture. The 1825 stone arch over Furnace Creek and the abandoned 1840s lock chambers along the south bank are still walkable today.