Chenango Canal Summit Level

Five miles of the old Chenango Canal, its summit level near Bouckville in Madison County, New York, remain filled with water today. The state built the canal between 1834 and 1836 to link Utica on the Erie Canal with Binghamton on the Susquehanna River, a route requiring 116 locks. The summit stretch needed none, though workers blasted through 25 feet of solid rock for two miles. The canal never succeeded commercially, and railroads in the 1860s took what traffic it had. The state closed it to boats in 1878 but kept the summit as a feeder for the Enlarged Erie Canal, and later for the Erie-Barge Canal, a role it still fills. Since the Chenango was never enlarged, it preserves the dimensions and methods of the original Erie Canal, very little of which survives. Surviving features include the canal prism, the towpath, stone bridge abutments, and the remains of an aqueduct over Oriskany Creek.