hour after hour up the towpath for 20 miles when I was five. When I was tired, I'd rest part of my weight on the towrope; it seemed to rest me. My father was at the helm. But when I became 10, I took my turn at the helm and a younger brother drove the teams. Whole families lived on the canal boats. I was the oldest of 21 children. We'd go to Oswego to load lumber for Bartlett's Mill in Binghamton. Hamilton was the highest point and where the canal froze up first in the fall. Often in the fall as many as 82 boats loaded with lumber would be tied up. When the freeze was just beginning, Bartlett would bring up several teams, hitch them to a bunch of stumps and drag through the canal to break the ice so boats could get lumber to his mill. Canalling was a varied business. For instance, we'd take a lot of firkins and get them filled along the way with butter for the merchants. We'd boat grain up to the big stills at Hamilton, Pecksport, Bouckville and Solsville and bring back loads of whiskey which the merchants sold or shipped away. We only did the boating. Whiskey then sold for 25 cents a gallon. It was a busy canal in those days. Three years before the canal closed, about 50 years ago (from 1927), 120 boats carried coal. Closing Opened in 1834, Chenango Canal was a necessary link in the interconnecting transportation system in New York, for which the need was well-recognized at that time. Canals had been employed successfully in England to enable the Industrial Revolution. The extraordinary success of the Bridgewater Canal in North West England, completed in 1761, began an era of canal building in that country. The U.S., intent on its own development, would follow suit. However, the advent of the Chenango Canal, after having been tied up in the New York Legislature for 19 years, came late in the canal era. By the time of its construction, this type of canal and its technology was already becoming obsolete. The invention of the steam locomotive had already occurred in England in 1811, and the development of a railway system had begun in England by the mid-1820s. The success of those technologies and systems there would allow them to supplant the artificial water-route systems everywhere. The railroads