Wood Creek is a

river A river is a natural flowing watercourse, usually freshwater, flowing towards an ocean, sea, lake or another river. In some cases, a river flows into the ground and becomes dry at the end of its course without reaching another body of wate ...

in Central New York State that flows westward from the city of

Rome, New York Rome is a city in Oneida County, New York, United States, located in the Central New York, central part of the state. The population was 32,127 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Rome is one of two principal cities in the Utica–Ro ...

Oneida Lake Oneida Lake is the largest lake entirely within New York state, with a surface area of . The lake is located northeast of Syracuse and near the Great Lakes. It feeds the Oneida River, a tributary of the Oswego River, which flows into Lake Ontario ...

. Its waters flow ultimately to

Lake Ontario Lake Ontario is one of the five Great Lakes of North America. It is bounded on the north, west, and southwest by the Canadian province of Ontario, and on the south and east by the U.S. state of New York. The Canada–United States border sp ...

, which is the easternmost of the five

Great Lakes The Great Lakes, also called the Great Lakes of North America, are a series of large interconnected freshwater lakes in the mid-east region of North America that connect to the Atlantic Ocean via the Saint Lawrence River. There are five lakes ...

. Wood Creek is less than long, but has great historical importance. Wood Creek was a crucial, fragile link in the main 18th and early 19th century

waterway A waterway is any navigable body of water. Broad distinctions are useful to avoid ambiguity, and disambiguation will be of varying importance depending on the nuance of the equivalent word in other languages. A first distinction is necessary b ...

connecting the Atlantic seaboard of North America and its interior beyond the

Appalachian Mountains The Appalachian Mountains, often called the Appalachians, (french: Appalaches), are a system of mountains in eastern to northeastern North America. The Appalachians first formed roughly 480 million years ago during the Ordovician Period. They ...

. This waterway ran upstream from the

Hudson River The Hudson River is a river that flows from north to south primarily through eastern New York. It originates in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York and flows southward through the Hudson Valley to the New York Harbor between N ...

(at

Albany, New York Albany ( ) is the capital of the U.S. state of New York, also the seat and largest city of Albany County. Albany is on the west bank of the Hudson River, about south of its confluence with the Mohawk River, and about north of New York City ...

) along the

Mohawk River The Mohawk River is a U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed October 3, 2011 river in the U.S. state of New York. It is the largest tributary of the Hudson River. The Mohawk f ...

. Near present day Rome, the Mohawk River is about one mile from Wood Creek across dry land. In the 18th century, cargo and boats were portaged between the Mohawk and Wood Creek; the crossing was called the " Oneida Carry". In 1797, the Rome Canal was completed and finally established an all-water route. The waterway then followed a downstream run along Wood Creek to the east end of

. After a 20 mile crossing to the west end of the lake, the waterway entered the Oswego River system. This system led either to the Lake Ontario port at Oswego, or further westward along the Seneca River. The Mohawk River route was very important for more than a century. The only other waterway crossing the Appalachians lies far to the north in Canada. This was the

St. Lawrence River The St. Lawrence River (french: Fleuve Saint-Laurent, ) is a large river in the middle latitudes of North America. Its headwaters begin flowing from Lake Ontario in a (roughly) northeasterly direction, into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, connecting ...

, which flows northeast out of Lake Ontario to

Montreal Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, second-most populous city in Canada and List of towns in Quebec, most populous city in the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian ...

Quebec City Quebec City ( or ; french: Ville de Québec), officially Québec (), is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Quebec. As of July 2021, the city had a population of 549,459, and the Communauté métrop ...

, and the Atlantic. Philip Lord, Jr., for many years a researcher at the New York State Museum, has published extensively on the Albany-Oswego waterway and on its Wood Creek section.

18th Century fortifications and battles

In the 18th century, boats and their cargoes coming up the Mohawk River had to be moved a few miles overland to Wood Creek at the Oneida Carry (present-day Rome). The relaunched boats then navigated downstream to Oneida Lake and the Oswego River, which discharges into Lake Ontario. Wood Creek and the Carry were used by the canoes of Native Americans, and in 1702 representatives of

The Five Nations ''The Five Nations'', a collection of poems by English writer and poet Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), was first published in late 1903, both in the United Kingdom and the U.S.A. Some of the poems were new; some had been published before (not ...

petitioned

Lord Cornbury Edward Hyde, 3rd Earl of Clarendon (28 November 1661 – 31 March 1723), styled Viscount Cornbury between 1674 and 1709, was an English aristocrat and politician. Better known by his noble title Lord Cornbury, he was propelled into the forefr ...

, the governor of the British colony of New York, to mark the Carry and to clear Wood Creek of obstructions. In addition to periodically clearing obstructions, in 1730 a short canal was built to bypass a notorious "hook" in the Mohawk River. It is one of the first canals built in North America. Wood Creek and the Oneida Carry were of sufficient strategic importance that the British built three fortifications there in 1755 during the war with France (the

French and Indian War The French and Indian War (1754–1763) was a theater of the Seven Years' War, which pitted the North American colonies of the British Empire against those of the French, each side being supported by various Native American tribes. At the ...

(1754–1763)). Fort Bull on Wood Creek was the furthest west, and was the scene of the 1756 Battle of Fort Bull; after its destruction, it was briefly replaced by Fort Wood Creek. After the loss of Fort Oswego to the French forces in 1756, the British destroyed the Oneida Carry and Wood Creek fortifications. In 1758, the massive Fort Stanwix was constructed to defend the Oneida Carry, although it never saw action and was later abandoned. The fort was refurbished by American revolutionary forces in 1777. Stanwix was the site of an important 1777 battle in the

American Revolutionary War The American Revolutionary War (April 19, 1775 – September 3, 1783), also known as the Revolutionary War or American War of Independence, was a major war of the American Revolution. Widely considered as the war that secured the independence of t ...

, when British, Loyalist, and French forces came down from Canada and up Wood Creek to besiege the fort. They were unsuccessful, which contributed to the defeat of British forces at the

Battles of Saratoga The Battles of Saratoga (September 19 and October 7, 1777) marked the climax of the Saratoga campaign, giving a decisive victory to the Americans over the British in the American Revolutionary War. British General John Burgoyne led an invasion ...

shortly thereafter. The disastrous outcome of the 1777 British campaign is considered a turning point in the American Revolution.

Improvements by the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company

In 1791, following the American Revolutionary War and the independence of the United States, the

Western Inland Lock Navigation Company Western may refer to: Places *Western, Nebraska, a village in the US *Western, New York, a town in the US *Western Creek, Tasmania, a locality in Australia *Western Junction, Tasmania, a locality in Australia *Western world, countries that id ...

was chartered in New York State to make improvements in the Albany-Oswego waterway. Philip Lord has written, "This tortuous route was the only highway west of any consequence 200 years ago and it was the improvement of this water route from Schenectady to Oneida Lake that was the mission of Philip Schuyler's Western Inland Lock Navigation Company in 1792." Originally published in partnership with Ms. Barbara Spraker and the Canajoharie-Palatine Tourism Committee . When completed in 1803, the program of improvements would greatly increase the shipping along the waterway and substantially reduce its cost. The increasing population of settlers in western New York was also served by this waterway. The route to the western regions passed through Oneida Lake and the Oneida River. It then followed the Seneca River upstream, instead of going downstream to Oswego. This route stretched as far as Rochester and Canandaigua Lake. Philip Lord and Chris Salisbury write, "The most troublesome of the inland waterways was Wood Creek, a narrow and twisted channel which connected the west end of the 1797 Rome Canal to the east end of Oneida Lake (now Sylvan Beach). This stream was so narrow that travelers often recorded they could jump across it where the boats first entered it, and it was so deficient of water that boatmen often had to negotiate with a miller just above the landing place to release extra water from his pond to get the boats floated and on their way. Yet in spite of its fragility, Wood Creek was the lynchpin of the waterway route to the Great Lakes." Among the improvements to the Wood Creek waterway were 13 short canals cut in 1793 that bypassed

meander A meander is one of a series of regular sinuous curves in the channel of a river or other watercourse. It is produced as a watercourse erodes the sediments of an outer, concave bank ( cut bank) and deposits sediments on an inner, convex bank ...

s (or "hooks") in the creek; the cuts were "among the earliest artificial waterways for navigation in North America". Publication of this volume commemorated the bicentennial of the opening of the improved Albany-Oswego waterway in 1803. In 1802 four wooden locks were constructed to aid the passage from the end of the Rome Canal to the junction with Canada Creek; unusually, the locks were "covered", as was common for

bridges A bridge is a structure built to Span (engineering), span a physical obstacle (such as a body of water, valley, road, or rail) without blocking the way underneath. It is constructed for the purpose of providing passage over the obstacle, whic ...

in this region in the 19th century. This paper won the 2004 Robert M. Vogel Prize as the outstanding article in the previous three years published in ''IA, The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology''; see Lord and Salisbury have also discovered that a man named Abraham Ogden had used a sophisticated method known as "brushpiling" or a "kid weir" to improve navigation on Wood Creek; they write, "it is in the upper reaches of this tiny stream that we find extraordinary evidence of a direct linkage between American wilderness engineering and English waterway history. ...its use in Wood Creek in 1803 is the first application of this ancient English erosion control technology in the United States." The Oneida Carry was replaced by the Rome Canal in 1797. The program of improvements to the Albany-Oswego waterway by the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company had been completed by 1803, which permitted the replacement of the relatively small boats (''batteaux'') by heavier craft.

Prelude to the Erie Canal

As noted by Ronald E. Shaw, "These improvements made it possible in times of sufficient water for new

Durham boat The Durham boat was a large wooden, flat-bottomed, double-ended freight boat which was in use on many of the interior waterways of North America beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century. They were replaced by larger, more efficient canal ...

s as long as sixty feet and carrying sixteen tons to supplant those carrying only a ton and a half used heretofore on the river. The cost of transportation from Albany to Seneca Lake was reduced from $100 to $32 a ton, and that from Albany to Niagara by half. Down the canals came furs, lumber, pot and pearl ashes, wheat, and salt, and up them moved boats 'principally laded with European or Indian productions or manufactures'." 1990 reprint. In 1812 about 1500 tons of cargo was moved through Rome by this route. In the mid 19th century, John MacGregor wrote of the waterway, "However imperfect the navigation, as compared with that of the Erie Canal, which superseded it, its influence on the prosperity, the early and rapid settlement of western New York, is incalculable." However, Shaw concluded that "even with the company's works in operation the river boats could never supplant wagon carriage by land ... The canal builders of this period must be judged to have left a record more of failure than success." Nonetheless, thousands of workmen had learned the trades of canal builders, and the ''de facto'' engineers of the waterway had acquired experience and vision. Shaw writes that these men "bent on improving the navigation on the Mohawk at the turn of the century would be intimately involved with the New York canals for the remainder of their lives. Their experiences in canal making were being stored for future use. Limited as was their success, the efforts of these men to develop an inland water empire served as the first major step to the development of a greater project that would go far beyond Seneca Lake and Oswego, reaching its destination on the shores of Lake Erie."

Closing of the Wood Creek to Oswego waterway

In 1817 New York State chartered the

Erie Canal The Erie Canal is a historic canal in upstate New York that runs east-west between the Hudson River and Lake Erie. Completed in 1825, the canal was the first navigable waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, vastly reducing t ...

, which would solve the myriad problems of the Albany-Oswego waterway by building a system of unprecedented size and sophistication. In 1820 the works of the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company were purchased for the use of the Erie Canal, which bypassed the Wood Creek to Oswego portion of the old waterway in favor of a direct canal from Rome through

Syracuse Syracuse may refer to: Places Italy *Syracuse, Sicily, or spelled as ''Siracusa'' *Province of Syracuse United States *Syracuse, New York **East Syracuse, New York **North Syracuse, New York *Syracuse, Indiana * Syracuse, Kansas *Syracuse, Miss ...

and Rochester to Buffalo, on

Lake Erie Lake Erie ( "eerie") is the fourth largest lake by surface area of the five Great Lakes in North America and the eleventh-largest globally. It is the southernmost, shallowest, and smallest by volume of the Great Lakes and therefore also has t ...

. The Rome Canal and the waterway running west along Wood Creek to Oneida Lake were abandoned. Transcript of a talk given to the Canal Society of New York. The century when tiny Wood Creek was a channel for much of the cargo between the inlands of North America and the Atlantic seaboard had ended.

18th Century fortifications and battles

Improvements by the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company

Prelude to the Erie Canal

Closing of the Wood Creek to Oswego waterway

References

Further reading