This week’s question: The structure seen here is small but its story has several chapters. When the photo was taken, circa 1890, this building was well into its seventh decade and had undergone additions, remodeling and even relocation. Its original use had been abandoned some 50 years earlier. Do you know anything about this structure, its uses, its locations?
Last week’s answer: Obviously the photo from last week was Lock 24 but with images of something we pretty much no longer see.
![](https://i0.wp.com/eaglenewsonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/18-BHM-4-29-20.jpeg?resize=500%2C467&ssl=1)
The New York State Barge Canal is a successor to the Erie Canal and other canals within New York. It is a 525-mile system composed of the Erie Canal, the Oswego Canal, the Cayuga-Seneca Canal (the part that goes through Baldwinsville ) and the Champlain Canal. It connects the Hudson River to Lake Erie. In 1918, it fully opened, although our Lock 24 opened in 1908.
The Erie Canal had become outmoded as the need to transport goods from the Hudson River to Lake Erie increased. At that time barges like the ones shown in the photo were increasingly used so that a maximum amount of products could be moved through the state.
Barges like the one in the photo were common sights even up to the early ‘60s.
These large vessels transported a variety of products, but grain and oil made up the bulk of the traffic on the canal in its highest traffic years in the 1950s.
The Barge Canal carried its peak tonnage in 1951 — 5,211,472 tons. Grain shipments continued and the volume of petroleum carried increased during the postwar years, but the last load of flour went east in 1950, the last bricks went west in 1954, iron ore stopped coming down the Champlain Canal in 1955, and coal and lumber shipments stopped during the early 1960s. This came about with the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway which opened in 1959, with much more depth and larger locks. This gave ocean-going freighters access to Lake Ontario and beyond.
Today the canal is used by recreational vessels, but some commercial traffic still exists. Much of the cargo today is specialty cargo: items that are too big to move any other way or that need to be delivered to a waterfront location — steam turbine rotors, generators, wind turbine parts, crane, and bridge trusses. There is also a recent return of commodity traffic — corn to ethanol plants, barley to upstate breweries, even some wheat to the Port of Albany for export.
Email your guess to [email protected] or leave a message at 315-434-8889 ext. 310 with your guess by noon Friday. If you are the first person to correctly identify an element in the photo before the deadline, your name and guess will appear in next week’s newspaper, along with another History Mystery feature. History Mystery is a joint project of the Museum at the Shacksboro Schoolhouse and the Baldwinsville Public Library.