Published: July 18, 2008 01:11 pm            

ERIE CANAL DISCOVERY: Nathan Roberts, canal engineer — Part 1

Nathan S. Roberts is a name synonymous with Lockport and the Erie Canal. In Lockport, Roberts is remembered as the “engineer” who, without any formal training, designed and oversaw construction of the Flight of Five locks. He was one of a long list of men who left their legacy as a result of hard work and dedication to complete what some called Clinton’s Ditch. Their accomplishments made possible what we now know was one of the most profound public works projects that our nation has ever undertaken.

Nathan Robert’s birth came just a few days after our country began its own birth pangs in July of 1776. Robert’s grandfather had been a casualty of the French and Indian War and his father served in the Revolution. At the age of 16, Nathan Roberts was already teaching school at Plainfield NJ. He was one of the many canal engineers who had never attended any college or university to study the profession. Roberts’ limited education had allowed him to be an itinerant teacher. He moved from community to community and used his teaching income to do what his heart really called him to do - speculate in land sales. In fact, from his first teaching job in 1792 he was able to set aside two hundred dollars with which he purchased 100 acres of land in Vermont. This was the pattern for his life until he reached the age of 40 when another important event happened that not only changed his own life, but changed the lives of everyone-the construction of the Erie Canal.

In 1816, Judge Benjamin Wright, principal surveyor and engineer for the central section of the proposed Erie Canal, named Nathan Roberts to assist him as assistant engineer. Wright had a working knowledge of surveying, although, Roberts did not. Roberts was chosen for his abilities with mathematics. Roberts’ first assignment was to survey the route between Rome and Seneca Lake. He and his team of 13 men were able to accomplish the task in a little under a year, in spite of the incredible obstacles presented by the Montezuma Swamp. They slept in tents at night, and faced seeming endless wilderness by day. This was made all the worse by the unbearable heat and the blood thirsty mosquitoes. Robert’s journal describes his daily food choices, “a piece of pork, salt, and hard, hard bread. Whiskey and swamp water.”

On July 4, 1817, Nathan Roberts stood with the Canal Commissioners and others in thrilled anticipation as the first dirt was dug at Rome NY to start the construction of the Erie Canal. In June of 1822, Roberts’ Erie Canal career would take him to a desolate, remote outpost at the base of the Niagara Escarpment. Behind him to the east, nearly 300 miles of Erie Canal had been dug and most placed in service by 1824. But ahead of him, in this outpost lay the greatest challenge of all. The Niagara Escarpment presented a 70-foot natural solid rock obstacle to the flow of water; the same prehistoric mountain ridge over which Niagara Falls joined Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. Indeed, the canal engineers had left the hardest assignment for last. This solid wall of stone that stretched for miles and miles was all that was left to prevent the waters of the Lake Erie to flow to the Hudson and on to the Atlantic. (To be continued…)

Doug Farley is director of the Erie Canal Discovery Center. Contact him at 434-7433. The Discovery Center is open for the season.

        

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