Season 2, Bonus Episode: No One Would Dig a Canal Sober.
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE:
On Today’s Episode:
An excerpt from my interview with Derrick Pratt from the Erie Canal Museum on the intersection of whiskey and the building of the canal, how out of control canalers influenced temperance, the infamous Bloody Valley of Watervilet, and some beef between the canalers and… well… everybody else.
With Special Guests:
Derrick Pratt is the Museum Educator and Interim Curator at the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse, NY. A native of Chittenango, NY, Derrick received a B.A in Social Studies Education from SUNY Cortland and a M.A. in Museum Studies from Syracuse University. Prior to his job at the Erie Canal Museum, Derrick served as Director of Programs at Chittenango Landing Canal Boat Museum for 3 years. Check out the Erie Eats Exhibit at the Erie Canal Museum.
The Was Is Could Be podcast is produced by Liz Russell at To Eat and To Love, LLC. Each episode is carefully edited by Joshua Rivers of Podcast Guy Media, LLC. Our theme music is made by Neil Cross and published by ImageCollect Publishing.
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[🎶 Intro Music 🎶]
Liz Russell Narration:
As you can imagine, there are like 6,000 different things I could have covered in this season of the podcast. Food touches that much of our lives. But as with any projects, we had to put some bounds on the scope of the season. That said, I'm excited to share a few more amazing conversations I had with my interviewees. The first one in this episode is probably my favorite of the season. It’s a hilarious conversation that I had about mixing alcohol and the Erie Canal.
Liz Russell:
We've touched on two things that I want to kind of dive back into, the restaurant and bar industry.
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
Yep.
Liz Russell:
It’s something that also started to boom around the canal. Can you talk about that?
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
Sure. With the Erie Canal and the just thousands, perhaps millions, more people traveling on its waters, you needed to service those travelers, be they working on the canal, working in warehouses, just tourism booms. Niagara Falls becomes the first major American tourist destination because you can now easily access it from the canal. Similarly, all along the canal, taverns open up. It's estimated there are about one tavern or bar every quarter of a mile on the Erie Canal, a lot of them concentrated in cities. But yeah, by the mid 1800s, you're at that point. Here in Syracuse, for instance, and a lot of the major cities on the canal, these big grand hotels start springing up. But even in smaller communities, I always enjoy knowing I'm from Chittenango and where, what is now Bolivar Road, it was Bolivar Road then, that intersects with the canal today.
That was once a fairly prosperous settlement. We wouldn't be able to tell it today. There's like three houses there. But Bolivar had a hotel there to service these canal travelers. So there's these hotels, taverns and grocery stores just covered the Erie Canal ‘cause everyone needs to eat, everyone likes to drink, especially on the canal. So they grow, but there's places like here in Syracuse, there was the Syracuse House. That's this kind of grand hotel, hosted presidents and everything. It's right there on the Erie Canal next to the packet boat docks. And on the lower floors of most of these hotels are kind of these early restaurants. The restaurant didn't exist yet fully as a concept, but they started to grow. There's another place on the other side of the canal eventually grows, the Empire House. They serve pretty good cuisine.
Oh yeah. You can see that picture over there. It's behind the war memorial. It's the Empire House.
Liz Russell:
Hmm.
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
Yeah. And they're right there on the canal, in Clinton Square, those places. So yeah, there's an extensive kind of restaurant-ish. It's early nascent restaurants. Also there's packet boats, which I've talked about a little. There's passenger boats, they operate for the first maybe 40 years on the canal, before railroads kind of supplant them and packet boats were boats specifically for passengers and they also carried the mail. That's where they get the packet part from. Packet boats were regularly operating. They'd go between certain points and for the price of your ticket, you got fed onboard them. You gotta place to sleep, so on. It’s believed that pulling carts were inspired by packet boats. Yeah. They had their own almost onboard dining services. Yeah. That's the food service industry,
Liz Russell:
I don’t know if you might know the answer to this, but is it… because it was pre-railroad, is it fair to say that this was maybe one of the first times in the U.S. that you're having that kind of curated traveling and eating experience, that dining while traveling? ‘Cause I feel like you wouldn't on a stage coach or something, on a horse operated seat.
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
Yeah. Well, yeah there, you would just kind of stop at…
Liz Russell:
Right?
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
…a tavern, something, some crossroads. Yeah. The Erie Canal was, like I said, the first major conduit for tourism and everything that goes along with tourism, with catering to tourists, with food and places to stay and things to do. There were some of the first tourist books that told you where to go. They were for this kind of trip, this tour across New York state where ultimately your goal was to get to Niagara Falls, but they'd be like, oh, when you're in the Utica area, check out the Baron von Steuben grave, it's nearby. That kind of thing. I dunno if they specifically said that.
Liz Russell:
Yeah. [laughs]
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
Hops production becomes huge in upstate New York. I got a few stats, credit to Matt Ertz, the Madison County historian. In 1850, upstate New York had the perfect climate for growing hops and also perfect elevations and everything. And the hop industry exploded here in upstate New York as did the distilling industry, the cider industry. There was a lot of cider, both the stuff we have today and hard cider, though, I guess hard cider’s come back as well. So all along the canal, there's distilleries, there's breweries and whatnot. And in 1855, the three counties of Madison, Oneida, Oswego County were producing 5.5 million pounds of hops annually. By 1880, those three counties were producing 21 million pounds of hops, which accounted for 80% of the nation's hops in general. Syracuse had about, I think, 40 breweries or so on it. And we talked about Merrill Sewell, it wasn't on the canal because between it and the canal was the Greenways brewery. It's today where interestingly Talking Cursive Brewery is nowadays. And that whole block, it was, I believe, eight stories tall and occupied an entire city block. Greenways was huge.
Originally here in upstate New York, people were drinking whiskey primarily. It was actually a more economical way to transport corn, in large ways. The canal workers digging the original canal were often paid in whiskey rather than money. One canal scholar looking at labor estimated that canal diggers were paid what essentially amounts to about seven to 12 shots a day, I think, that was just as their wages. They could then buy more whiskey after work with the money they got paid too. There's a good way to keep them compliant. Often heard it said no one would want to dig a canal sober to begin with. It's incredibly hard work.
There's a famous legend that out towards the Buffalo area, as they got to some really difficult parts, canal foremen would put a barrel of whiskey at where they wanted the canal diggers to get to. And once they got there, they could enjoy the whiskey. So there's that. Whiskey was big. However, as things really started to change because a ton of German and Irish immigrants started moving into this region. Germans, especially bring a ton of brewing knowledge to places like Syracuse, Utica. F.X. Matt’s, Utica club fame, they were founded by a German immigrant. There's Haberle’s here in Syracuse, which is a massive brewing company that made Congress beer famously, but there's tons of these breweries dot all these cities along the canal. Most of them would go out of business as Prohibition happened, which happened to a lot of breweries, which also kind of got its start on the canal.
Canalers became infamous for how much they used to drink. Again, I said there was a tavern every quarter of a mile. It also became very closely linked with the women's suffrage and women's rights movement as well. The temperance movement, and people like Susan B. Anthony, she lived in Rochester. In Canal City, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, they've both fought for temperance along with suffrage and these issues.
The two amendments that, one for prohibition, one for women's suffrage, were passed almost at the same time. And the Erie Canal was a crucible for a lot of these new ideas as well, because it was an information super highway as well as a goods super highway. So the abolition movement is incredibly strong here, along the canal, the women's rights movement and the temperance movement. And the temperance movement, you can very easily point to, being like, look at all these drunk canals here. If we get rid of alcohol, they won't be an issue anymore. I don't know how effective that all worked out, but yeah. We talked about hotels, but we have in our collection here, a menu from a temperance hotel, which was like a block from the canal. So if you didn't wanna associate with any of these canalers who were drinking, you could go to a temperance hotel, they would serve you. I don't know. You could just not order a beer, uh, while you're at a hotel, but…
Liz Russell:
With everyone else, and all these crazy canalers. Is there any iconic stories of these canalers that could give listeners context of what we mean by this? Is there a story of them, I don't know, lighting something on fire or a bad brawl or something?
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
Well, I think I'll describe Watervliet, which is out by Albany, that place has far more than one tavern per quarter mile. There was a side cut on the canal where everyone would hang out. Oh God, I'm trying to remember a quote. It was something like a newspaper reported that there was like one body found a week there, there was like just a ton of brawls. You didn't wanna go. It was like the bloody alley, it was called. Also Watervliet was called the Barbary Coast of the east. Buffalo was called the Barbary Coast of the west because that's where you were gonna get into all these fights. Out in Buffalo, notoriously, there'd be these Great Lakes sailors, they and canalers hated each other. They would get in these giant brawls as they would meet kind of at the taverns alongside where the two intersected, that kinda thing. That's where it gets the Barbary Coast of the west.
There’s also reports of all the bars kind of in and around Syracuse, people would regularly drown in the canal because they'd be drunk. It was also an era where you didn't know how to swim. That wasn't necessarily true. So a lot of people drowned in the canal, especially at night, they didn't have the safety things we have today alongside canals, you know, fences and whatnot. So you'd be walking and then, whoops, there's a canal in the middle of the night where you can't see if you're drunk. You're not looking too carefully either. So yep. We have, uh, this building in the Weighlock, we have accounts of dead bodies floating into the lock chamber and stuff because they assume generally like, oh, guy got drunk and fell in the canal. Drowned.
Liz Russell:
That is so funny. I mean, it's not funny. It's terrible, but it's definitely not what I think of when I think of the Erie Canal.
Liz Russell Narration:
You can find a ton more about the Erie Canal Museum's Erie Eats Project in their new book. It's called Erie Eats: The Erie Canal Food Waste Project. And it features a bunch of information from the exhibit, some extra things that couldn't fit into the exhibit, and my personal favorite, some recipes actually from the 1930s canal boat cook Oliver Wendell Petrie. Snag a copy in the museum store, or online at eriecanalmuseum.org/store.
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