2025 Sloan Lecture Series
We offer lectures each month on a variety of topics. Our theme for 2025 is (R)Evolutions. Throughout its history, the Erie Canal has been an agent of change and transformation, both gradual and abrupt. It was revolutionary in its own right while also being shaped by and influencing other transformative events. It has also been a continually evolving waterway, adapting throughout its history to meet the needs and demands of the communities it flowed through and connected. These changes reverberate up to the present with both positive and negative impacts that we continue to grapple with historically. As we commemorate the bicentennial of the Erie Canal’s completion in 2025, the Erie Canal Museum aims to examine these diverse transformative impacts on peoples and places in the past, present, and future in a variety of ways, which we look forward to sharing with you throughout the year. All Sloan Lectures are available both in person and via Zoom. Everyone who registers will also receive a recording of the talk.
Thank you to the Winifred & DeVillo Sloan, Jr. Family Fund for supporting this series.
If you have difficulty registering please call 315-471-0593 or email educator@eriecanalmuseum.org
Current Schedule of Lectures (more lectures and information will be added soon!)
Thursday, December 11 @ 12:00 PM – The Southern Reservoirs of the Erie and Chenango Canals
From the 1830s through the end of the century, over a dozen dams and reservoirs were built to supply water to the Enlarged Erie and Chenango Canals. These included dams that raised the level of natural lakes, such as Cazenovia, and larger earthen dams that impounded creeks creating reservoirs where no water body had existed, such as Erieville Reservoir (Tuscarora Lake) and Madison Reservoir (Lake Moraine). We’ll explore the history of some of these reservoirs including their origin, operation, and effectiveness, and the challenges and benefits they present today having lived on beyond their original purpose.
Previous Lectures:
Wednesday, January 15 @ 7:00 PM – How the Erie Canal Created Queer Life in Brooklyn
At the beginning of the 19th century, the Erie Canal transformed life across America in exciting and unforeseeable ways, and we are still living with the reverberations of those developments. Come hear historian Hugh Ryan (author of When Brooklyn Was Queer) discuss how 339 miles of canal turned Brooklyn from a collection of sleepy hamlets out on Long Island into an urban mecca for LGBTQ+ life.
Wednesday, February 12 @ 6:00 PM - 2024 & 2025 Erie Canal Artists-in-Residence Roundtable
Join the Erie Canal Museum and New York State Canal Corporation in hosting 2024 Erie Canal Artists-in-Residence Judit Germain-Heins, Alon Koppel, and Clara Riedlinger in presenting their work over the last year as well as our incoming 2025 Artists-in-Residence Sarah Cameron Sunde and Kari Varner, who will discuss their upcoming projects.
Thursday, February 20 @ 12:00 PM – Illuminating the Lost Voices of Lorenzo
New York State’s history of enslavement is often overshadowed and underrepresented in the histories presented to the public. However, New York State historic sites are in the process of bringing this conversation to the forefront of information presented to the public, and Lorenzo State Historic Site in Cazenovia is no exception to this development. Lorenzo is the 1807 home of John Lincklaen—the founder of Cazenovia—and boasts a collection of objects and documents that span from the mid-1700s to the mid-1900s. Interpretative staff at Lorenzo are currently working to dig deeper into the collections to find more detailed information on the people enslaved by the owners of Lorenzo and give voices to those that have yet to be fully heard in its history.
Friday, March 21 @ 12:00 PM – Along These Waters: Lost Voices of the Erie Canal
Along These Waters is the culmination of designer and artist Meri Page’s creative exploration into the everyday lives of the women and children who worked, learned, played, and lived along the Erie Canal. Page will dive into these stories of women and children, who are rarely acknowledged in the Erie Canal Museum's interpretation. This talk accompanies the temporary exhibition of “Along These Waters," which weaves together contemporary photographic images of the Erie Canal with archival images, letters, and oral histories.
Thursday, April 3 @ 1:00 PM – Trolley Boats, Electric mules, and Battery-Electric Ships: Experiences from the Erie Canal and the European Inland Waterways
As early as in 1893 the first electric trolley boat operated on the Erie Canal. Throughout the next two decades various tests with so-called ‘electric-mule’ systems were carried out on short sections of the canal. The vision behind these experiments was a complete electrification of the navigation on the Erie Canal making transportation so efficient, that even the old Erie Canal would have allowed for transportation volumes that ultimately caused the construction of the New York State Barge Canal. The lecture will introduce the history of electric propulsion and electric hauling trials on the Erie Canal and discuss why they remained on an experimental stage, while comparable systems in Europe reached full commercial implementation. This talk will be presented by Dr. Ingo Heidbrink, Professor of Maritime History at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. He is an internationally renowned maritime historian, specialist for inland waterway history, and holds a master’s and engineer’s license for commercial inland waterway navigation on European waterways.
Saturday, April 5 @ 10 AM - Under One Roof: Lacrosse, Pottery, and One Historic Site
The historic canalside Chittenango Pottery Company building was recently restored and has been rented to Powell Lacrosse. This event will examine how the histories of lacrosse and Canal-side industry intersect at this building. We will be joined by experts Mike Beardsley, the Town of Sullivan historian, and Rex Lyons, head coach of the Haudenosaunee Nationals. Speakers will discuss the Indigenous history of Chittenango and Madison County, the industrial history of Chittenango Pottery, and the history of lacrosse. This event will be held at the Chittenango Middle School, located at 1732 Fyler Rd, Chittenango, NY 13037.
Thursday, May 22 @ 6:00 PM - Determined Not to Enter the Ditch Again: Labor Struggles of the Erie Canal
Most Erie Canal histories focus on the great and glorious; DeWitt Clinton, Benjamin Wright, and Theodore Roosevelt. However, the Canal’s construction, operations, and the transformative changes it unleashed, hinged upon the blood, sweat, and toil of millions of working class individuals. Exploring the effort to expand the waterway and the labor organizing happening alongside the Erie Canal, this talk looks at those workers and their struggles to carve out a more equitable existence throughout the Canal Corridor. Come learn about our reinterpretation project and celebrate Labor History Month with us at a brief reception before the talk, starting at 5:30 PM.
Saturday, June 7 @ 3:00 PM – The Lafayette Trail Across Upstate
Join Julien Icher, President of the Lafayette Trail, in exploring a New York story of American Republicanism narrated by a French Marquis. As Icher details Lafayette's historic journey across Upstate New York, he will describe the changes Lafayette encountered across the landscape including economic prosperity and the Erie Canal, for Indigenous populations, republican education, and women's empowerment.
Thursday, July 10 @ 12:00 PM - The Erie Canal and the Birth of American Religions
Within 25 years of its opening, the Erie Canal cultivated extraordinary experimental spiritual groups including the Mormons, the Adventists, Spiritualism, a revived Apocalypticism, utopian communal societies such as the Oneida Community, with the Amana Colony and Shakers passing through, as well as the emotion-laden revivals of the Second Great Awakening. The Canal also engendered the religiously infused social movements of abolition, women's suffrage, and temperance. And because of its key location and function as the link between East and West, the repercussions of canal-formed spiritual experiments rippled across the continent with westward expansion, creating unique currents of religion in the United States into the present day. This talk will be presented by SB Rodríguez-Plate, a writer, speaker, editor, and professor of religious studies whose books include A History of Religion in 5½ Objects, Blasphemy: Art that Offends, and Religion and Film. Their essays have been published in Newsweek, Slate, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Christian Century, The Islamic Monthly, the Huffington Post, and elsewhere. They are Executive Director of the Association for Public Religion and Intellectual Life; and Editor of the journal CrossCurrents.
Wednesday, July 30 @ 5:15 PM – Ideas Borrowed, Ideas Adapted: Engineering New York’s Barge Canal
Engineers who planned and designed New York’s Barge Canal at the beginning of the 20th century looked to Europe for new waterway technologies. America’s canal building boom had peaked around 1860, as railroads captured an ever-growing portion of the nation’s freight traffic. There were improvements to the Erie and connecting waterways throughout the 19th century, but most were incremental rather than radically different. Meanwhile, new techniques for managing water and moving vessels appeared in Europe, where inland waterways remained vital elements of the continent’s transportation infrastructure. Some were adopted, some were rejected, and others adapted for Barge Canal structures. This talk will look at some of the borrowings, as well as some European designs that were deemed unsuitable for New York’s topography and climate.
Thursday, August 28 @ 12:00 PM – “Go Ahead Anyway”: The Marvels of Engineering Hutzpah that Helped Surmount Enormous Geographic and Construction Obstacles
This talk explores the difficulty of the canal’s construction and the necessity of simultaneously creating massive aqueducts, locks, and other mechanical marvels across extreme elevation challenges. The engineering “team,” cobbled together on the fly, had to learn on-the-job, often producing trial-and-error solutions to complex, dangerous situations. Special focus will be given to the little-known story of self-taught Canvass White, whose curiosity, expertise, and versatility as an early, intrepid engineer saved the day. What did this uncelebrated hero accomplish in the face of material failure and structural disaster?
Thursday, September 18 @ 12:00 PM - "Certain Heavy Scales Fell From My Eyes": William Seward, the Erie Canal, and the Making of a Reformer
Though often overlooked in his long political career, William Henry Seward's early experience critically debating the politics of the Erie Canal proved formative. In this talk, the Seward House Museum’s Director of Education, Jeff Ludwig, will explore how Seward reversed himself on the Canal as a young man, a decision that ultimately forged his political philosophy and set him on a path towards becoming a New York Governor, U.S. Senator, and Secretary of State.
REFLECTIONS ON ERIE'S WATERS SYMPOSIUM - Sunday, October 5 at Skä•noñh Great Law of Peace Center
- Sunday, October 5@ 11:00 AM - "Sacred Waters: The Trauma of the Erie Canal"
Jake Haiwhagai’i Edwards and Dr. Philip P. Arnold discuss the impact of the Erie Canal on the Haudenosaunee. For millennia, waterways in Haudenosaunee territories have been profoundly important. In the Haudenosaunee cosmology, water is sacred as fundamental to all life. Therefore, while waterways were used for transportation, as food resources, and as locations for settlement, it was widely agreed among Indigenous peoples that they also be protected. The Erie Canal disrupted the natural flow of water, essentially damming watersheds so as to flow in an east-west direction. As Laurence Hauptman has discussed in Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State, the creation of the Erie Canal corresponded with the dispossession of the Haudenosaunee. Transformation of the landscape throughout the 19th century had profound environmental effects and traumatic consequences on Haudenosaunee relationships to their lands.
- Sunday, October 5@ 1:00 PM - "Clearing Iroquoia: New York’s Land Grab in the 1779 Campaigns of the American Revolution"
Join authors Travis M. Bowman---the head of museum collections for the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation’s Bureau of Historic Sites--and Matthew A. Zembo---associate professor of history and military history at Hudson Valley Community College and instructor of American history at Bard Early College---for a talk about their new book, Clearing Iroquoia: New York’s Land Grab in the 1779 Campaigns of the American Revolution.
In 1778, George Washington, Philip Schuyler, army officers, and New York officials began planning invasions against Iroquoia, the homeland of the Haudenosaunee and several other allied Indigenous nations. Bowman and Zembo’s Clearing Iroquoia offers a fresh perspective on the Clinton-Sullivan campaign and hard truths about of the dispossession of the Haudenosaunee homeland and American colonialism.
- Sunday, October 5@ 3:00 PM - "The Oneidas, the Best Land, and the Erie Canal"
“Our children’s hearts are sick,” mourned Skenandoah when he learned that New York State in 1815 had purchased almost 1200 acres of Oneida land. This tract was the last piece of Oneida land the state needed to acquire before it built the Erie Canal through the center of the state. I grew up on this tract on our family farm, which my grandfather once referred to as the best land in Madison County. When I was in high school in the 1970s, the Oneidas asserted that New York State had purchased their land in violation of federal law and the courts agreed. Through the years of litigation, confusion, prejudice, and revival that followed, I carried questions about what had happened on the best land and why didn’t I know anything about it. The answers include the Erie Canal and the silencing and erasing of Native voices and presence that accompanied the transformation it wrought on the ancestral land of the Oneidas in central New York.
Susan A. Brewer is the author of The Best Land: Four Hundred Years of Love and Betrayal on Oneida Territory and other books. After 25 years as a professor of American history at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, she retired from teaching and is now an independent scholar who makes her home in the Adirondacks.
Saturday, November 1 @ 1:00 PM - Policing the Erie Canal
Based on historical research from the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office Historic Preservation Project (1989-2014), this presentation focuses on law enforcement issues surrounding the storied Erie Canal. Topics include -19th century policing equipment, the character of policing of the era, the urban red light canal districts, the legacy of the orphaned canal boys, the Sabbatarian movement, various canal code laws, and the unique challenge for law enforcement with the canal’s role in the underground railroad, and the canal’s role in the 1851 Jerry Rescue episode.
Saturday, November 1 @ 2:30 PM - Sink or Sing: The Infamous Sing Sing Prison's Intersectional History with Syracuse & the Erie Canal
Join Amy Hufnagel, the Assistant Director of the Sing Sing Prison Museum (Ossining, NY), for an illustrated talk about the expansion of the NY State penitentiary system in 1825. If you are curious about 1) who built the architecture of confinement in our early statehood; the 2) legacy of first Warden, Elym Lynds (a hardware store owner from Syracuse); the 3) 100 incarcerated men who were some of the very first humans to travel the Erie Canal; and 4) who were the first advocates for prison reform in the USA, this program is for you! Using history, poetry, and 19th century art and memoir, this interdisciplinary history talk illuminates what happens when waterway engineering, religion, military philosophies join hands to address social and economic challenges. Why do we have prisons? Who decided how to punish and fix humans? These are not simple questions!
Thursday, December 11 @ 12:00 PM - The Southern Reservoirs of the Erie Canal and Chenango Canals
"The vast commerce of the Erie canal cannot be stopped, even a single day, without a loss to those who conduct it of many thousands of dollars." Middle Division Engineer's Office, Syracuse, December 6, 1856; sustaining construction of Cazenovia Lake Reservoir
From the 1830s through the century, over a dozen dams and reservoirs were build to supply the water to the Enlarged Erie and Chenango Canals. These included dams that raised the level of natural lakes, such as Cazenovia, and larger earthen dams that impounded creeks creating reservoirs where no water body had existed, such as the Erieville Reservoir (Tuscarora Lake) and Madison Reservoir (Lake Moraine). We'll explore the history of some of these reservoirs including their origin, operation, and effectiveness, and the challenges and benefits they present today having lived on beyond their original purpose.
If you would like assistance registering or to discuss accessibility for the program contact Derrick at outreach@eriecanalmuseum.org or by calling 315-471-0593. He would be happy to talk with you.
