It was was the busiest lock on the Erie Canal. In its heyday around 1880, it served 47,000 vessels a season – one boat every four minutes – on the Empire State's most famous waterway.
Today, Lock 23 in Rotterdam is not well known with the exception of bikers and walkers who might give it a glance as they pass along an overgrown section of the Mohawk Bikepath.
On a recent Saturday, a group of Union students, faculty and staff spent a day clearing brush and small trees as part of a project that revealed Lock 23 as a marvel of engineering, its meticulous stonework nearly as neat as it was more than a century ago.
“I hope that this is a step in a longer term program of preserving and promoting this historic structure,” said event organizer Andrew Morris, assistant professor of history.
The lock was important historically as a busy transfer point for the overland route to Albany, which avoided waiting at locks in Cohoes and Waterford. Due to high volume, Lock 23 was expanded to a double lock.
The lock doors are gone, but an observer can get a sense of what it was like as boats passed through.
Students and faculty from Union's civil engineering department, led by Prof. Andrew Wolfe, rehabilitated the lock over a four-year period ending in 2003. That work included rebuilding the wooden pier on the west end of the lock and installing a replica of a locktender's hut, the yellow and brown building on the site. The hut was built as a senior design project in 2001.
Read More