Back to the future for Erie Canal boat Seneca Chief

Oct. 7—BUFFALO — The Seneca Chief was the first vessel to float from Buffalo to New York in 1825. It was 73 feet long and weighed 40 tons.

Two hundred years later, a replica of the boat will make that same voyage as part of the 2025 bicentennial celebration of the "wedding of the waters" from Lake Erie and New York Harbor as the Erie Canal was opened.

Building such a replica is no easy task — there are no blueprints, no photographs and almost no records indicating how the Seneca Chief was crafted 200 years ago.

How would the replica be built in time for the 2025 World Canals Conference in Buffalo?

These were the questions that plagued Greg Dudley, woodworker, carpenter and master boat builder, after he was asked in 2020 to come up with a design for the vessel.

"We started by getting all the resources collected," Dudley said. "There were no photos or designs, so we got our information from paintings and the descriptions of people who were there."

Dudley did his research during the COVID-19 pandemic and presented his plan when lockdown was finally lifted.

"Basically we got a table, 73 feet long, and drew everything on it and used that as a design," Dudley said.

It wasn't a conventional way of drafting a blueprint, but it seemed to work.

Inside the Buffalo Maritime Center on Wednesday, Dudley showed off the progress on the replica Seneca Chief. One layer of its siding is coated with resin, but the outermost layer is made from the same materials that were used to build boats in the early 19th century.

Eventually, the planks of the outermost layer will be submerged in water with cotton laid between each plank.

"The cotton absorbs the water and expands, then contracts. Then the wood is allowed to expand and make the entire boat water-proof," Dudley said.

Buffalo Maritime Center is where volunteers from around the region gathered in 2016-2017 to build The Erie Traveler, the Durham-style wooden boat that's used in Flight of Five locking demonstrations in Lockport.

Hundreds of volunteers are involved in construction of the Seneca Chief replica, including Doug Hartley of Clarence, wood working hobbyist and Flight of Five volunteer lock tender. He was working on the Seneca Chief replica Wednesday. He did a brief show-and-tell on the volunteers' construction of plywood for the bow.

Larger wood planks kept snapping when the volunteers tried to bend them to the shape of the boat, so they had to make their own plywood, Hartley said: Making smaller boards, gluing them together, then steaming them to the exact shape.

"That was a real blast," he said.

Hartley and Dudley, along with Buffalo Maritime Center Executive Director Brian Trzeciak and city and state officials, will gather at noon today to install the last plank on the replica. That's known as the "whiskey plank" and its placement is a major moment in the construction of the wooden boat.

"This will be an incredible event that everybody is invited to," Trzeciak said. "(With it) we'll be one step closer to the launch of the Seneca Chief."

The event is admission-free and will include a traditional whiskey dedication, with non-alcohol options.