Mellow Traditions of Erie Canal Boat Families

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 69, 8 April 1937, Page 13

Mellow Traditions of Erie Canal Boat Families

Varied Cargoes, Hard Work and "A Good Life"

CANALLERS by scores are tied up for the winter in Coenties Slip, and across New York harbour (writes Janet Mabie in the Christian Science Monitor). The . boats are leaving the canals for the winter and the family crews are showing no great ' concern over the latest developments in the discussions before the International Joint Commission of the proposed new waterway between New York «and Montreal. At this time of year 50 or more canal boats are tied up at the tip of Manhattan or close by. Partly, it is the ice creeping into the canals. Then the children have to go to school. The boats have lace curtains at the windows, and dark green window shades, and the wash flies* in multicoloured primness on Mondays. There are radios and books in the cabins and, though it gets noisy, nights, when there is fog or sleet or snow in the harbour and all shipping blows its whistles and sends out across the waters the hollow hoot of its foghorns, it's pleasant and agreeable, down under the shadow of the towers in the fmancial district. Local Born Historian. ^O-DAY'S foremost historian of the canallers is Walter D. Edmonds. He was born in Erie canal country and grew up in the thick of its lore. "Before the railroad," Mr. Edmonds says, "there was the Erie canal; before the canal boats there were the Pennsylvania wagons; and before the Pennsylvania wagons there were the Durham boats to • carry traffic in and out of western New York. They worked along the Mohawk from Schenectady to Rome. The Western Inland Navigation Company had built docks around Little Falls, and at Rome "they had more locks to carry the boats into Wood Creek, down which they ' went to Oneida Lake. "From Oneida Lake, lt the water was right, they' could flnd their way along the Oneida and Seneca Rivers into the Finger Lakes region. They carried the heavy freight, produce, "wood and lumber for the riverside towns; hides, ashes and sometimes wheat when a farmer thought that the high price made his shipment a worthwhile speculation." * * • Grain isn't the infrequent cargo these days. In the West canal it's the chief one. Boats travelling through the North canal carry paper, lumber, hay, coal, up as far. as Quebec. It takes them about 15 days from New York to Quebec. They go from New York to Troy, then through Lake Champlain, and into the St. Lawrence to Quebec. The boats aren't quite the same these days either, but the changes are natural ones that go with progress, not the kind

that bring a calling to. its pathetic obsolescence. They aren't particularly clumsy, to judge from those tied up like a covey of slate-gray, squat birds at Coenties Slip. They axe long and fairly narrow; indeed they have a certain suggestion of greyhound efficiency, if not speed, in their lines. They are completely roofed over; some have' what amounts to penthouse proportions, evidently a result of a higher ceiling for the cabin. The penthouse arrangement is covered over on the outside with tar paper, trimly flnished with nails that have disk-like heads, like stage coins. There are slender poles on most of them for radio antennas, and poles for the clothes lines that hold the family wash. In a way, the canallers ■ make you think _ of circus people. It is their arrangements for comfortable living. They have the necessary genius for planning the use of small space; the family may very well con- : sist of six or .eight members, for the canaller is no man to leave his wife and family in one place, while he works in another. Most of them grew up on the canal, and their fathers and grandfathers before them. Their children begin to handle the hawsers when they are ten years old or so, and, for much of the work, " are as good as their elders. That's, of course, in the time when they can be lawfully out of school. In the great days of the Erie, the canal b.oats were hauled by horses or mules. Now everything is steam. A tug that looks largely like the cutter that carries Customs men down New York harbour to meet incoming steamers, tows the boats and there aren't any horses or mules along the canal banks any longer. No Eight-Hour Day. ^N eight-hour day? The "canallers never heard of it. For the boats stop only when "grub" is needed or the wife requires a piece of calico and a spool of thread. She can't do much shopping— there isn't time. Canallers are hearty-eating folk. The cabin stove burns coal or wood or both, and there is always cooking to be done, and cleaning, because a canal boat is no place for dirt. The canaller has to stand his watch and be up at all the locks. Toward the end of the season it gets pretty cold, and the lines are apt to be stiff, wet and cold. If ice does form on them, it is a heavy job to handle them. Then, in other weather, there's always the chance of high water," and then cables may break, there may be losses of cargo. If the barge isn't loaded right it may stick up too far out of the water and hit a bridge. The canallers know there has . been a depression, but you gather that relatively 0 they have felt it only a little. Business •

has been continuously pretty good— perhaps better than for many of those on land — and they look for continuing imrovement. Some of the canallers take work down around New York harbour in winter, hauling coal and so on. The women like the li'fe. Of course they don't have electric irons and. washing machines, but they come of generations that didn't have them either, and they don't bother. They get their reward in the sparkling eyes and bright cheeks of the children, who are strong and well, and cairn and willing to do their share. Most of the women were brought up on the canals, too; some of them got as far as the eighth grade, and it wasn't always easy to get that much schooling. In a way it astonishes them that now the school authorities are willing even ta send a bus to the slips where the barges are tied up, to fetch the children to school. * • * "yyHAT do they do besides cook and wash and sew and clean? They read, and tell stories, and play games and listen to the radio. They flgure out places to put up new shelves to hold the canned goods. { The light is from kerosene ljamps. Tied > up at the slips,' there is a telephone out on the stringpiece, in a booth just beyond the shack that has a sign on two .walls, "No Hangen Round the Shack." A barrel on the roof of the cabin holds a supply of water which is Rlped to a faucet. Strung up near the ceiling are extra clothes lines, • in ease it rains or snows. A tgble, a dresser, four chairs (at least), and often a baby's crib take up most of the rest of the space. • . ' . The canaller provides his own furniture and is allowed by the company. owning the barges to live aboard. If any helpers accompany the captain, he has to pay them— but they are worth it if there is " trouble with the hawsers. Pride and Caste. gTAND with a foot on the deckside of a barge and talk all this over with the canaller— whose hands are full of nails that he's using to make minor repairs in the cabin covering— and he'll smile gravely, the flapping lines of Monday wash making shadows across his leathery face; and he'll squint up at the maritime signals, flying their vari-coloured bunting from the mast of a neighbouring building, and say he doesn't know what the signals mean. "Ain't got no call to know. Them's for sea-goin'; I'm a canaller." There is pride and caste ln his voice. Then he'll look over all the squat gray length of his barge, and in at the window at his wife and baby, smiling and rocking in the afternoon sun. If you ask him if he is contented he will still smile slowly, jingling the nails in his worn hand, and say, simply, "It's a good life."