Celebrate the opening of the Erie Canal

The New York State Archives has launched an innovative educational website: Erie Canal Time Machine. Located at www.archives.nysed.gov, the site promotes learning through the use of historical records.

The Erie Canal Time Machine is a document-based trip to the past designed for elementary and middle school students and teachers, as well as the general public. Divided into three time periods. the website includes more than 40 historical documents and photographs that illustrate the canal's opening in 1825; its operation and impact on the citizens of New York state and beyond during the 1830s; and the controversy surrounding the creation of the Barge Canal in 1903.

The site offers concise historical information as well as short topical essays written by historians. There are three document-based questions geared for 4th-8th grade students and an extensive document gallery of photographs, letters, maps, broadsides, petitions and prints, which may be downloaded and incorporated into student projects or lessons. A bibliography and links to other websites about the Erie Canal are also included.

Erie Canal Time Machine brings travelers back to 1825 when New Yorkers celebrated the opening of the Erie Canal as Governor DeWitt Clinton traveled the length of the new "manmade river" to dump a barrel of water taken from Lake Erie into the Atlantic Ocean.

Documents presented in the 1830s section of the Erie Canal Time Machine illustrate how the canal stimulated commerce in New York state by decreasing shipping costs for goods from Buffalo to New York City from $125 to $4 a ton. Historical records also recount the negative impact of the Canal on New Yorkers -- from flooding entire communities, to spreading cholera and dividing farm fields in half making the property practically worthless.

The 1918 section of the Erie Canal Time Machine examines the controversy generated by the $101 million expansion of the Erie Canal to create the Barge Canal system in 1903.