Lift bridge operator Jane Newcomb works with a loving sense of history
Watching Brockport’s lift bridges go up and down, the observer may not think about the hands that maneuver the magical machinery. Since 2000, Jane Newcomb has been one of those lift bridge operators at Brockport’s Park Avenue and Main Street bridges. This season she starts work at the Village of Holley lift bridge. At age 70, she has worked on the Erie Canal for a total of 25 years.
“I absolutely love working on the canal, I always have and I always will. It is like working in a time warp with all this old machinery and old facilities that have been taken care of by so many people down through the years,” Jane said. “And to think the canal was hand dug, hand built, in the late 1800’s early 1900’s, to me is a phenomenon.”
For a quarter century she has made her own mark caring for the canal. Starting as a “canal walker,” she became a canal site operator at locks 32 and 33, and then a lift bridge operator in Brockport.
Her love for the canal and its history began as a child living in the Town of Clay, north of Syracuse. Her family owned a farm and her uncles operated locks on the canal at Brewerton. “We loved the canal and loved being there around the water,” she said. “We used to go to the locks, fish, have picnics and watch the sunset.”
Teaching ends, canal tending begins
Jane went to The College at Brockport in the 1960’s. With a Master’s degree from Indiana University, she taught for 18 years in public and private schools in the greater Rochester area. Her school teaching career ended when Webster closed some of its schools around 1983.
She became a full-time level two ski instructor at Bristol Mountain, which continued for about 12 years. She started a small business for summer work, doing wallpapering, interior painting, and landscaping. Being unhappy with the inside summer work led to her first canal job in 1986. Walking with her twin sister on the canal in Brighton near lock 33, her sister suggested she stop at the lock office and ask for a job application. Jane was hired immediately as a bank walker covering 12 miles each day to check for leaks or breaches in the walls of the canal.
Caring for the historic equipment
After about three years as a bank walker, Jane trained to be a canal site operator, working first at Lock 32 in Pittsford, then at Lock 33. She describes the locks’ electrical control panels that have needed maintenance since the canal’s beginning: “Turning off the electricity, by hand with fine tools, we had to remove the nuts, bolts, fuses and, using rouge, shine and polish the copper tops of fuses and the brass on the control panels,” Jane said. “That was the ongoing maintenance from spring to fall.” Any fault in running the valves or gates would mean probable failure in an electrical panel, requiring a quick and risky response to trouble shoot.
Although the crude equipment demands constant maintenance, she is fascinated with the engineering genius that created the canal equipment which has survived for over a century. “I love the job for the fact that something so beautiful and simplistic — so authentic in its structural design using the law of gravity — still works today in the operation of the gears, bridges, locks, gates and every feature of the canal.”
Family tragedy brings interruption and new situations
Jane’s youngest son died in 1994. She moved to Colorado for about five years to “regroup,” she said. She returned from Colorado to care for her elderly mother in Irondequoit. “That’s when I started in Brockport around 2000.” Accompanied by her dog Anna, it was a job that had her walking or biking between the two bridges, plus doing maintenance work on the site. (Her training on various lift bridges had taken place when off duty from the locks).
She commuted from Irondequoit to Brockport until 2008. “That’s when I bought my 1880’s farm house fifteen minutes from Brockport on the Hamlin-Parma Town Line Road,” Jane said. With over 13 acres and a vegetable garden, “It’s much like where I grew up. I always had this yearning to get back to the country.” She loves having visits by her older son’s children, seven and four years old. In the winter she is a full-time grandmother wanting “to be present for them” at school activities and on field trips.
Daily work in the context of history
At the Brockport Park Avenue and Main Street lift bridges, “We did sanding, painting, mowing and gardening – all of the site maintenance in addition to putting the boats through,” Jane said. This year she has transferred her multi-tasking job to Holley. “I was doing so much, I just realized I didn’t need to work so hard at my age,” she said about the change she requested.
She is still doing maintenance and putting boats through, Jane said, but explained everything is on a smaller scale and at a slower pace with only one bridge in the rural setting. “It’s a very appropriate move for me at the age of 70,” she added. “It’s a new beginning.”
In the “time warp” she refers to, Jane is mindful of the canal’s history as she tends to it daily. “I have a passion for the Erie Canal and its beautiful history,” she said. “When I work or walk on the canal, I can just feel the sense of humanity that lived and worked here over time. I am one with the past and the present, joining so many people who love it today while boating, walking, jogging or biking.”
