The Canal That Changed America: The lively history, unique communities, and vital economic and social impact of New York’s Erie Canal

They called it "Clinton's Folly." Two centuries later, it looks like genius.

When New York Governor DeWitt Clinton proposed a 363-mile canal connecting the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, the skeptics were loud. They were also wrong. The Erie Canal moved goods, people and ideas across the state, and the cities that grew up along it, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, and farther west to Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago, became industrial powerhouses. New York City became the world's foremost port of commerce. Along the canal's banks, social movements took root too: abolitionism, suffragism and utopian communities unlike anything the country had seen.

"The Canal That Changed America" tells that story. Walk the canal's towering lift locks, the hop fields and breweries that lined its banks and the grain elevators that defined Buffalo's skyline. Visit the small communities, from Little Falls, home to one of the world's tallest lift locks, to Lyons, known as the Peppermint Village, where the canal's history is still part of daily life. Read about the canal's complicated relationship with Indigenous communities, the activism it inspired and the art and architecture it left behind.

The Democrat & Chronicle brings it all to you in this hardcover coffee-table book, as seen through the camera of photojournalist and kayaker Tina MacIntyre-Yee, who paddled 60 miles of the canal in its bicentennial year and came back with close to 100 photographs of the waterway, its wildlife and the towns and people along it, in every season.

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