Buffalo Maritime Center recreating boat that opened Erie Canal

Oct. 18—Recreating a part of history is always a challenge, especially when that challenge involves creating an era-accurate boat that traveled the Erie Canal.

John Montague, the president emeritus for the Buffalo Maritime Center will be speaking at 7 p.m., Oct. 27 at the Lutheran Church of the Messiah Fellowship Hall in Lewiston, presented by the Historical Association of Lewiston. There, he will speak about the current project the Buffalo Maritime Center is working on, recreating the "Seneca Chief" canalboat that opened the Erie Canal.

First sailed by Gov. DeWitt Clinton in 1825, the Seneca Chief traveled from Buffalo to New York City along the newly completed canal to celebrate the new connection between east and west. This new project recreating that boat will be completed in time for the canal's 200th anniversary, with plans to sail the boat down the canal to commemorate it.

The first proposals for building the boat were from 1997, with Montague saying that Buffalo had an identity issue since the decline of the area's industrial base. Having the boat at the terminus of the Erie Canal would only attract attention to the canal and Buffalo's origins, but to its connection with the Erie Canal system.

A former Buffalo State College professor, he founded the school's Center for Watercraft Studies in 1993, wrote books about local watercraft, did outreach programs, and founded the Buffalo Maritime Center after he retired from Buffalo State in 2006.

"I'm a historian to begin with, so I'm interested in the history of naval architecture in the area," Montague said, with some other projects he worked on including one canal boat to go up Lockport's Flight of Five locks, recreating a fishing boat from 1815, and rebuilding the smallest boat that took part in the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. That boat, planned to be completed next summer, will travel to Old Fort Niagara when it launches. The Maritime Center was involved with the creation of the Canalside area in Buffalo.

"We tested ourselves with 55-foot boats before taking on the 73-foot boat," Montague said. "All these Erie Canal towns come from the same place. They were originally created by the canal, so this would be a wonderful way to link them together."

Montague did lectures about the harbor's history wrote several pieces that appeared in the Buffalo News about this opportunity. When negotiating with the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation, development only moved forward after a private individual offered to help pay for it, which resulted in $150,000 awarded from the Canal Corp. and $49,500 from the New York State Arts Council in 2018.

The work takes place in a longshed at Buffalo's Naval Park, which is open for public viewing. Construction started when the keel was laid in the fall of 2020, with two full-time boatwrights and 110 volunteers working on it, from members of the public, school groups, and the carpenters union. Plenty of research was done to determine the proportion and shape of boats from that area, made up of drawings, verbal descriptions, and registrations for boat designs as era-appropriate as possible.

The boat frame is made of white oak, which had to be brought in from northern Pennsylvania and Ohio, and the planks are cedar from North Carolina, both lumber types that were plentiful here back in the 19th century. 800 bronze bolts were also made to fasten the boat together.

"What we're producing is a boat as close as anybody got to what boats were like," Montague said, with new research discovered changing how the boat is designed. "It was 63 feet long, and we found one source that said it was 73 feet long. It's going to get to the point where we finish, then someone says that's not right, and we tweak it later."

Since construction started, Montague said the site had thousands of local and international visitors seeing its progress.

"This is supposed to be an educational project," Montague said. "We're not only being educated about it, but it's a touchstone for future developments in future developments in this research."

When the Seneca Chief is completed, it will first launch in the spring of 2024 to do some sea trials and go up to Lockport and Middleport while its logistics are worked out. It will have a 100-year-old tugboat from the Lake Champlain museum and horses used as its propulsion, as the boats going along canals like this were pulled by mules.

In the summer of 2025, the reborn Seneca Chief will do its recreation of Gov. Clinton's opening of the Erie Canal, traveling between Buffalo and New York City and visiting the cities lined up along the way. The grand opening took place on Oct. 26,1825, so plans are being made for July and August to avoid bad weather.

The ultimate goal of this celebration is to recreate the "wedding of the waters" from the canal's opening, where a bucket of Lake Erie water was dumped in New York Harbor and vice versa.

When the Seneca Chief's journey is complete, it will be tied up at Canalside for public viewing, still being emblematic of how Western New York got its first major economic boom.