I’ve been to several canal museums and all of them are adjacent to a canal, except this one. The Syracuse section of the canal was filled up, it used to run through the middle of the city. But high demand meant that it had to be widened and that was difficult to do in a built-up area. It is now routed through Oneida Lake about eight kilometres northeast of the city.
The museum itself is in one of five former weigh stations that acted like toll booths on a highway, this is the only one preserved. They would measure how much of which good was being transported on a boat by weighing the entire boat and charge the relevant fee. A mock boat lies on the dry canal channel preserved for the museum.
The canal stretches over 500 kilometres from Niagara Falls to Albany to connect the Great Lakes with the Hudson River, which connects to the Atlantic Ocean at New York City. The elevation change of about 200 metres is overcome with 18 stone locks.
After just ten years of operation, it needed to be enlarged to accommodate thousands more boats. The state legislature passed an act to enlarge the canal in 1838 and it was almost doubled in every dimension.
