Canal Zones 5d

Here’s my last canal ruins post, this one focusing on vestiges of the corridor as a dynamic industrial hub.  Day Peckinpaugh, delivered as cargo ship Interwaterways 101 in May 1921 is certainly not in ruins, as her younger sister–by two months–

Interwaterways 105 has been since 1976, here disintegrating in the Arthur Kill.

Below the photo shows the dock in Rome where Day Peckinpaugh used to offload cement.

The Mohawk banks in Amsterdam . . . once a major location for carpet and rug making . . . now hold silent factories.

Not having been up the bank here, I can’t say whether Fownes still makes gloves here.

On the south side of the Oneida River, docks exist where no supply barges have called in many years.  Anyone help with info on when supplies last arrived in Clay via barge?

. . . or here not far north of Onandaga Lake?

I don’t know the number of bridges for pedestrians, trains, or automobiles that cross the canal, but this one clearly remains as scrap and carries no traffic of any sort.

Which brings us back to the Duluth-built younger sister of Day Peckinpaugh, also depicted near the beginning of this post.  I’d always wondered about Duluth, thinking it an unlikely location for construction of vessels that came to work on the canal.  But maybe it isn’t.  President Wilson created the US Railroad Administration (USRA) in December 1917, federalizing the railroads of the US as well as the Erie Canal.  Wilson placed the USRA in the hands of his son-in-law W. G. McAdoo, who soon thereafter nationalized strategic inland waterways including the Erie Canal and placed them in the hands of a Duluth shipping executive G. A. Tomlinson.

To reiterate what I said at the beginning, Day Peckinpaugh is not among the ruins along the canal although its future role is under study.  Meanwhile, neither is ship tourism along the canal dead, as evidenced by Grande Caribe approaching from Peckinpaugh‘s stern.  Click here for more pics of Grande Caribe.

All photos by Will Van Dorp.