How America Built Aqueducts That Carried Canals Over Rivers

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[00:00:00]The year is 1841.

[00:00:02]In a quiet bend of the Mohawk Valley at Fort Hunter, New York, a pair of mules steps onto a stone bridge 624 ft long.

[00:00:12]Below them, the Scohairy Creek runs cold and brown. Above them, a wooden trunk holds the Eerie Canal in the air. The boat floats. The mules walk. The river passes beneath. I pulled the engineer's name from the New York State Archives.

[00:00:29]He was John Bloomfield Jervis of Rome, New York. 14 stone arches, two construction seasons, no power on earth but oxen, chisels, and the muscle of an American stonemason.

[00:00:45]I have been reading the old construction ledgers for the enlarged Eerie Canal, and the story they tell is not the one in the textbooks. The textbooks give you a date and a ribbon cutting. The ledgers give you names, wages, weights, and weather. They give you the men. I want you to meet two of them before this video goes any further. The first is John Bloomfield Jervis. Born in Huntington, Long Island on December 14th, 1795.

[00:01:14]His family moved to Rome, New York when he was three. He worked his father's farm for 7 years after the schoolhouse let him go.

[00:01:22]Then in 1817, when the first shovels broke ground on the original Eerie Canal, Jervis hired on as an axeman. He cleared brush for about 50 cents a day.

[00:01:32]By 1825, he was chief engineer of the entire central section. By 1839, the state asked him to design the largest stone aqueduct on the enlarged Eerie Canal, the one at Scohairy Creek. If you care about the men who built this country with their hands, the workers nobody ever wrote a book about, please subscribe to Global Old History right now. Hit the button. Come back. The second man is Canvas White. Born September 8th, 1790 in Whitestown, New York. Wounded in the assault on Fort Erie in the War of 1812.

[00:02:09]walked 2,000 m across England on foot in 1817, studying every canal lock and aqueduct the British had built. Came home, ran experiments on limestone from a quarry at Chitanango, and in 1820 patented the hydraulic cement that would hold every Eerie Canal aqueduct together underwater. Canvas White did not live to see the Scary Aqueduct finished. He died of pneumonia at age 43 in 1834 in St. Augustine, Florida. But his cement was in every joint. These are the two men I want you to carry with you through the next half hour. A farm boy who became an engineer. A wounded soldier who became a chemist. Both gone. Both fingerprints on the stone. Now, let me explain what an aqueduct actually is because the word has gotten lost. An aqueduct in the 1820s was not a Roman ruin. It was a working bridge built to carry one river over another river. The Eerie Canal was itself a river, a man-made river 40t wide on the original cut and 70 ft wide on the enlarged version, 4 to 7 ft deep, running about 363 mi from Albany to Buffalo. When that man-made river hit a natural one, the engineers had two choices. They could drop a dam in the creek and float the boats across the still water above it, what they called a slackwater crossing. Or they could build a stone bridge tall enough and wide enough to lift the canal clean over the top of the river, water above water. The first choice, the slack water crossing, was cheap. It was also unreliable.

[00:03:50]Every spring, the Mohawk Valley flooded.

[00:03:53]Every February, the ice broke up and tore the dams to splinters. The original Eerie Canal crossed the Skohairy Creek that way on a series of timber dams. And every year the state spent more money repairing those dams than it had cost to build them. By 1839, the canal board had had enough. They authorized the enlarged Eerie Canal. They authorized a real aqueduct. They gave the design job to Jervis and the construction contract to Otis Eddie. Here is what they built.

[00:04:24]14 stone arches, each one 24 ft wide. A length abutment to abutment of 624 ft and 3 in.

[00:04:36]Two abutments at either end, 13 peers on the downstream side. Cut stone set on bedrock mortared with canvas whites hydraulic cement led at the joints in the old fashion of the day. Each faced stone in the main course was secured by an iron bolt passing through it from the top down. On top of the stonework, a wooden trunk, heavy timbers and planks cockked watertight, 24 ft wide on the inside. That trunk held the canal water.

[00:05:06]That trunk held the canal boat. On the north side of the trunk, a toe path planked and railed for the mules. The whole thing about 40 ft above the creek bed at normal water. I want you to picture this.

[00:05:20]A canal boat 80 ft long drawn by two mules walking a wooden path next to it.

[00:05:26]They come around a bend at Fort Hunter and the tow path leads them out onto a stone bridge. The mules step onto the planks. The boat slides into a wooden box of water. The boat keeps moving.

[00:05:39]Below the boat is the creek, brown and fast. Above the boat is the open sky.

[00:05:46]The driver called a hoggy in the canal slang of the day does not stop. The mules do not stop. The country has just done something the country before it could not do. It has carried a navigable river through the air over another river. That is an aqueduct. I have walked the crossing state historic site near Fort Hunter. Six of the original 14 arches still stand in the creek bed. The stone is gray and patient. The cement holds. After 185 years and uncounted floods, Canvas White's hydraulic cement is still doing the job he patented it for. Now, let me tell you how they got the stone there in the first place. The stone for the Scohairy Aqueduct was quarried locally. Mostly limestone with some sandstone for the courses that took the heaviest weather. The masons cut every face by hand with iron chisels and wooden mallets. A good face stone for an arch vouso, the wedge-shaped piece that locks an arch in place, weighed between 400 and 800 lb. A keystone, the topmost stone of the arch, weighed more than 1,000 lb. There were no diesel cranes.

[00:06:56]There were no pneumatic drills. There were ox carts, hemp ropes, wooden derks worked by hand winches, and the strength of men. The cement came from Chittenango in Madison County where Canvas White had located the natural deposit 20 years earlier. The limestone there, when burned in a kiln and ground to powder, produced a cement that set hard underwater. The masons mixed it with sand from the creek bank and water from the creek itself. They trled it into the joints. The job had to be done before the cement set, which gave them about 30 minutes per batch. The records are incomplete, but here is what I found in the New York State Archives. The Masons worked from sun up to sun down, 6 days a week through the spring, summer, and fall of 1840 with a winter pause from December through March when the mortar would not cure in the cold. The wage records for the Eerie Canal are in the New York State Library in Albany. They cover 60 years of work. They give a common laborer about $1 a day in the 1820s, rising to $1.25 by the 1840s. A carpenter or stonemason on a specialty job like an aqueduct was paid more. The wage range that survives in the Eerie Canal Papers runs from $1.25 per day for menial labor up to $3.25 per day for skilled bridge carpentry between 1841 and 1869.

[00:08:25]A first rate stonemason on the Scaryi aqueduct cutting vouso and setting them would have earned somewhere between $1.50 and $2 per day. Quick pause. If these stories matter to you, I am putting them into a series of books. The men nobody wrote a book about. The ones who built this country with their hands.

[00:08:46]Volume one is out now. Scan the code on your screen or click the link in the description. then come back. Because what happened next is the part most people never hear. $2 a day, six days a week, $12 a week, about $600 in a full season if a man worked the whole stretch and did not lose a finger. I want to walk you through one day of work on the Scary Aqueduct, the way the construction logs let me reconstruct it. Sunrise about 5:45 in the morning in late June of 1840. The masons gather at the south abutment. The foreman calls roll. The cement crew is already at work mixing the first batch of the day. Sand from the creek bank. Hydraulic cement powder hauled in barrels from Chitanango by canal boat the previous week. Water from the creek itself. They have about 30 minutes per batch before it sets. So they will mix small and mix often all day long. A boy of 14 years carries water from the creek up to the mixing trough in two wooden buckets on a shoulder yolk. His wage in the ledgers of that decade ran about 40 cents a day.

[00:09:57]The stone gang is at the quarry about half a mile south of the bridge site.

[00:10:02]Two senior masons cut voars. The wedge shapes are marked on the rough block in chalk. The masons score the lines with a chisel and a 4-PB mallet. They split the stone along the score. They dress the face with finer chisels until the surface is smooth and the angle is true.

[00:10:22]A good cutter shapes between three and six vousoars in a day depending on the size and the complexity of the cut. The carting gang loads the cut stones onto ox carts, four to six stones per cart, depending on the weight of the piece.

[00:10:34]The oxen, slow and steady, walk the half mile to the bridge. The bridge crew is waiting with a wooden Derek. The Derek is 20 ft tall. Three timbers lashed at the top, a hand winch at the base, a hemp rope, and an iron hook at the working end. Two men work the winch. Two more guide the stone into position with iron pinch bars. The setter, the senior mason in charge of placement, kneels on the wooden scaffold above the rising arch. He trles cement into the bed. He signals the winchmen. They lower. The vouso settles into place. He taps it with a wooden mallet. Level. He trled cement into the side joint. He signals for the next stone. This is the rhythm.

[00:11:23]Cut, cart, hoist, set, all day, 6 days a week from April to November, weather permitting. The Masons sleep in shanty camps along the toe path. They eat salt pork, hard bread, beans, and whatever the creek in the woods provide. They drink coffee in the morning and whiskey at night, both rationed by the contractor as part of the wage. Sunday was the only day of rest, and even Sunday meant chores in the camp. Otis Eddie, the contractor, walks the site once a day. He checks the arches under construction. He talks to the foreman.

[00:12:02]He notes any stone that is cracked, any mortar joint that looks weak. The foreman makes the men redo the joint if it looks weak. There is no second chance with an aqueduct. A canal aqueduct that fails under load drops a 40ft column of water into a river full of canal boats.

[00:12:20]There is no margin for sloppy work. The arches go up centering first. Centering is the wooden form that holds the shape of the arch while the stones are being set. Heavy timber cut to the curve, propped on false work, planked across the top. The vousoars are set on the centering. When the keystone goes in, the arch becomes self-supporting. The centering can be struck, that is knocked loose, and dropped, then moved to the next pier.

[00:12:50]The Skohari aqueduct had 14 arches, which means 14 centerings were built, set, struck, and moved across the course of 1 and 1/2 construction seasons. Now, I want to take you west 170 mi to Rochester, New York, because at almost the exact same moment Jervis and Eddie were finishing the Scary Aqueduct, a second crew was finishing an even larger one over the Jese River. And the story of that second aqueduct at Rochester is the story of how Americans learned to do this work twice. The first Genesee River aqueduct was built between 1821 and 1823.

[00:13:27]The chief engineer was Nathan S.

[00:13:30]Roberts, born July of 1776 in New Jersey, a former itinerant school teacher who had taught himself mathematics well enough to be hired as Benjamin Wright's assistant on the original Eerie Canal. Roberts was the same man who designed the famous flight of five double locks at Lockport. For Rochester, he designed an aqueduct of red medina sandstone with a coping of Anandaga limestone, 82 ft long, 17 ft wide on the inside, 11 stone arches. It cost the state of New York $83,000.

[00:14:05]It opened in September of 1823 and from the very first season it leaked. The sandstone was too soft for the constant load of running canal water. The mortar had been mixed with common lime, not hydraulic cement, because the Chitanango cement supply was not yet reaching as far west as Rochester in the rush of the original construction. By the 1830s, the leakage was so bad that the city of Rochester was effectively running a small waterfall down the side of the canal trough. summer and winter alike.

[00:14:36]Canal boats arrived in Rochester with their decks half soaked. The canal board ordered a replacement. That first aqueduct stood for less than 20 years as a working canal carrier. The lesson cost the state of New York $83,000 in the original build and untold more in patch repairs across the 1820s and 1830s.

[00:14:58]Some lessons in engineering have to be paid for in dollars before they can be paid for in stone. By 1836, the canal board had learned this lesson, had hired the right engineer, had ordered the right limestone, and had committed the budget to do the second build properly.

[00:15:14]The price tag of that commitment is what we are about to look at. Construction of the second Genesee aqueduct began in 1836 and finished in 1842.

[00:15:24]They moved it a short distance south of the first one. They built it entirely of anandaga limestone. They cut the number of arches from 11 down to seven using semic-ircular Roman arches of 52 feet span each. Fewer arches with wider spans meant fewer peers standing in the river current which meant less weight against the spring floods. The peers were 10 ft thick. The arch section ran 444 ft across the river. Wing walls and abutments brought the total length to 800 ft. The overall width was 70 ft with a 65- ft wooden trunk holding the canal water. Cost, according to the historical tablet affixed to the structure in 1893, $600,000.

[00:16:09]Read that figure again. The first aqueduct cost $83,000.

[00:16:14]The second cost $600,000.

[00:16:17]About 7 times the original. That is what it cost the state of New York to do the job correctly the second time with the right stone and the right cement and the right number of arches. That second GE aqueduct is still standing today. The wooden trunk is long gone, but the seven stone arches remain. They form the base of the Broad Street Bridge in downtown Rochester. Walk under it, touch it. The hands that cut that stone are dust. The stone is not. I have run the numbers three different ways on the Scohairy aqueduct. With 14 arches at 24 feet wide each and peers between them 6 to 8 feet thick, the cutstone tonnage on the peers and arches alone runs into the thousands of tons. Every ton of it carried by ox cart from a local quarry.

[00:17:11]Every stone faced by chisel. Every joint trled by hand with hydraulic cement. And now I have to tell you the part of this story that does not appear on any historical marker. The aqueducts of the Eerie Canal cost lives. Quick pause. If these stories matter to you, join the boss tier for $4.99 a month. Loyalty badge, custom emoji, early access 24 hours before public, and membersonly polls. Link in the description. Now, back to it. The historical record on this is uneven. The New York State Canal Board kept good books on dollars spent, but the books on men killed are spotty.

[00:17:52]The general figure that historians site for the entire Eerie Canal effort across original construction and the later enlargement runs to about 1,000 workers dead out of roughly 50,000 men who passed through the project. over the years. Disease in the swamps, gunpowder accidents in the rock cuts, drowning, collapsing trenches, and on the aqueduct specifically falls.

[00:18:20]A mason setting a vousoir 30 ft above a creek bed has nothing under him but air and a wooden scaffold lashed together with rope. A keystone weighing 1,000 lbs swung in by hand winch on a wooden derk can crush a man in an instant if the rope phrase or the hook turns in the eye of the stone. The records of individual deaths on the Scohairy aqueduct are not preserved by name in any construction ledger I have been able to read. The ledger gives no name, only a number. I want to say this carefully. I am not going to count those men for you. I am going to honor them. Every stone in those 14 arches at Fort Hunter, and every stone in those seven arches at Rochester, was set by a man whose hands knew the weight of the stone, the smell of the cement, the cold of the river wind off the Mohawk in October, the sting of mortar on a cut knuckle. Some of those men went home at night. Some of them did not. Their names are gone. The arches remain. I want to talk for a moment about the floods. The Scary Creek on a quiet July afternoon runs maybe 2 ft deep over a gravel bed. The creek is waitable. A child can throw a stone across it. But the Scary drains a 500 square mile whed in the Catskill foothills. When the spring snow melt comes off the mountain or when a summer thunderstorm parks itself over the wershed for an afternoon, the creek does not stay quiet. The Scohairy can rise 20 ft in 8 hours.

[00:19:56]It can move 10,000 cubic feet of water per second through that same stretch under the aqueduct. The engineers knew this. That is why the Scaryi aqueduct had 13 peers and not three. That is why the arches were 24 ft wide, no wider, so the load on each pier was kept inside the limits of what the local limestone could hold. That is why the peers were set on bedrock, not on driven piles. The aqueduct was designed to survive what the creek would do to it, not what the creek looked like in July. The first major test came in the spring of 1846, the season after the aqueduct opened to service. The Mohawk Valley got hit with a heavy snow melt and a warm rain on top of it. The Scaryi ran at flood stage for 9 days. The aqueduct held. The wooden trunk leaked at the seams, but the stone arches did not move. The canal board sent inspectors in May. The inspectors filed a report saying that the aqueduct was, in their words, in perfect order.

[00:20:59]The second test came in 1869.

[00:21:02]Another spring flood, this one with ice.

[00:21:05]Ice flows the size of canal boats came down the creek and hit the upstream peers like battering rams. The aqueduct held. One face stone on the third pier was cracked. The masons replaced it the following summer. The arches kept their shape. That is what good engineering looks like. Not a structure that wins a fight against nature. A structure that absorbs the punch and stays standing. I want to say one more thing about the cement before we move on. Because the cement is the thing that nobody sees and nobody photographs and nobody puts on the postcard. The cement is what makes the difference between an aqueduct and a pile of rubble after the first winter freeze. Canvas White's hydraulic cement, the one he patented in 1820, was made by burning a particular limestone from the deposits at Chittenango in Madison County, then grinding the burned product to a fine powder. The chemistry of it was not understood at the time. Nobody in 1820 knew about calcium silicates or illuminates.

[00:22:06]What they knew was that this particular powder mixed with sand and water and trrowled into a joint would set hard underwater within a few hours and would stay set for a hundred years. They knew it because Canvas White had tested it.

[00:22:22]He had built test peers in 1818 and 1819, submerged them in the Mohawk for a season, then come back and measure the loss. The loss was zero. That cement is the reason the scary arches are still standing in the creek in 2026.

[00:22:39]Common lime mortar, the kind they used on the first Genesee aqueduct, gives up the ghost in about 10 years of constant water exposure.

[00:22:47]Hydraulic cement does not. Hydraulic cement waits. The Scohairy Creek Aqueduct opened to canal traffic in 1845.

[00:22:57]Four years between the structural completion in 1841 and the actual opening to service. The delay was not the stonework. The delay was the rest of the enlarged Eerie Canal catching up around it. The enlargement was a $50 million program that stretched from 1836 all the way out to 1862. and the aqueduct at Fort Hunter sat finished and waiting while the rest of the new line was deepened, widened, and tied in. When the first boat passed over the Skohari aqueduct in the summer of 1845, the wooden trunk creaked under the weight of the water. The mules walked the planked towath without flinching. The hoggy on the bow of the canal boat held the tiller steady. The trunk held, the arches held, the cement held. From 1845 until 1915, that aqueduct carried the enlarged Eerie Canal across the Scohairy Creek without major failure. 70 years.

[00:23:57]The wooden trunk was rebuilt twice in that time in 1855 and again in 1873.

[00:24:03]The stonework was never rebuilt.

[00:24:06]The stonework only needed pointing. In 1915, when the new barge canal opened on a different alignment that bypassed Fort Hunter, the wooden trunk was removed.

[00:24:18]The stone arches were left standing in the creek. Spring floods began to take them one at a time. The first arch fell sometime in the early 20th century.

[00:24:29]Another collapsed in the 1950s.

[00:24:32]By the time the New York State Parks Department began the stabilization project in the early 21st century, six of the original 14 arches remained weathered, leaning, but standing. The stabilization project finished in May of 2023.

[00:24:49]The six arches are now braced. They will stand for the next generation. You can visit them today at the Scohairy Crossing State Historic Site a few miles west of Amsterdam, New York. There is a footpath along the old toe path. The interpretive signs name Jervis. The interpretive signs do not name the masons. Before I close this video, I want to take you one more place because the Eerie Canal aqueducts were not the end of the American story on this kind of structure. They were the middle.

[00:25:21]There is one more chapter and it was written in iron wire on the Delaware River. In 1847, three years before the Scohairy Aqueduct hit full service on the new enlarged line, a German-born engineer named John Augustus Robling began construction on a different aqueduct in a different place with a different idea. The location was the Delaware River between Minync Ford, New York, and Lacawaxon, Pennsylvania. The canal was not the Eerie. It was the Delaware and Hudson, a coal canal running from the Pennsylvania anthraite fields to the Hudson River. The river crossing at Lacawaxon was a problem nobody had solved. Timber rafts coming down the Delaware kept crashing into canal boats trying to cross by rope ferry. The D and H canal company hired Robling. Robling did not build a stone arch aqueduct. He built a suspension aqueduct. two iron cables, each one composed of 2,150 individual wires, spun in place by a machine Robling invented for the job. The cables carried a wooden canal trunk 535 ft across the open span of the Delaware, three stone peers in the riverbed, two abutments on the banks. The aqueduct opened in 1849.

[00:26:40]It was the world's first major use of spunwire cable on a working structure.

[00:26:44]It was the prototype in iron and wood for what John Robling would later build in stone and steel between Manhattan and Brooklyn.

[00:26:54]The Robing aqueduct still stands at Miniync Ford. The wooden trunk is gone.

[00:27:00]The wire cables remain. The National Park Service maintains it as a one-lane roadway bridge today. It is the oldest existing wire suspension bridge in the United States. I tell you this not to compare the three aqueducts. The Skoairy aqueduct and the Genese aqueduct and the Robing aqueduct are not in competition with each other. They are a chain. The hydraulic cement of canvas white held the arches together. The mathematics of Nathan Roberts gave Rochester its seven Roman arches. The wire spinning of John Robing pulled the trade forward into a new century. American engineering on the move decade after decade from the same starting line, the original Eerie Canal of 1817.

[00:27:48]John B. Jervis lived to 89 years old. He died in Rome, New York on January 12th, 1885.

[00:27:57]By the time he died, he had been chief engineer of the Croin Aqueduct that watered New York City for the first time, designer of the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad, consultant on a dozen other lines. He was the farm boy who became the dean of American civil engineering.

[00:28:12]He is buried in Rome, a few miles from the farm his father worked. Canvas White did not live to see any of it. He died of pneumonia in 1834 in St. Augustine, Florida, where he had gone for his health. 43 years old. His cement is in every joint of the Scohairy Aqueduct, the Jese aqueduct, the Croin Aqueduct, the Delaware and Raritton Canal, the Lehi Canal, the Chesapeake, and Delaware. Every great early American canal is held together by his patent. He did not get rich from it. The state of New York paid him a flat fee for the use of the patent on the canal works. The patent was widely used and widely copied. He died with a young family and modest savings. Otis Eddie, the contractor at Scohairy, finished the aqueduct under budget and on time and then disappeared into the longer history of the enlargement.

[00:29:09]The construction ledgers carry his name on the contract. The completion records carry his name on the certification.

[00:29:16]After that, his trail goes cold in the public record. The contractor's profession in 1840 was a hard one, and the men who did it well did not always leave many memoirs. Nathan S. Roberts went on to a long career that included chief engineering of the Pennsylvania Canal, the Pittsburgh and Kiskamatus Canal, and a survey of the muscle shores of the Tennessee River for navigation improvement. He was a school teacher who never went to college. He designed the Lockport Flight of Five, the original Genese Aqueduct, and a string of other structures that opened the American interior to canal commerce. and John Augustus Robling born in Prussia in 1806 built the Delaware Aqueduct in 1847 through 1849 then a series of suspension bridges that culminated in the Brooklyn Bridge on which he died from tetanus in 1869 before the bridge was finished. His son Washington Robing took over the work and completed it. That is the chain.

[00:30:15]Jervis, White, Roberts, Tring, Eddie, Robling.

[00:30:23]Five names.

[00:30:25]And behind each of those five names, hundreds of stonemasons whose names are not in any book. Men who lifted 400 lb vouso in October winds. Men who set keystones 1,000 lb heavy by hand, winch and hemp rope. men who walked the toe path every morning at sunrise and walked home in the dark. I have stood on the toe path at Fort Hunter on a cold October morning. The creek runs the same way it ran in 1841. The arches stand in the water, the cement still holding.

[00:30:57]There is no plaque with the name of the man who set the keystone of the seventh arch. There is no record of the mason who fell from the centering in October of 1840 when the rope went slack. The ledger gives no name, only a number. But the stone remembers. The cement remembers. The arches across the Mohawk Valley and the seven Roman spans under Broad Street in Rochester and the iron cables at Miniync Ford. All of it remembers. America built aqueducts that carried canals over rivers. American hands cut the stone. American oxen pulled the carts. American masons set the keys. Their grandchildren walk those bridges today and do not know. We will know. That is what this channel is for.

[00:31:43]The men who built the country with their hands deserve a record. They built the country anyway without one. The least we can do 180 years later is to read the ledgers and speak the names that are there and to honor the silence of the names that are not. One more thing before you go. Every name I find, every number, every record, I am collecting it all into a series of books so these men are not forgotten again. Volume 1 is available right now. Scan the code on your screen or follow the link in the description. See you in the next one.