The Erie Canal Trip in 1850

Excerpt from a letter written by Harriet J. Blanchard Willson to Emily May Langmade Butler – dated January 24, 1909

     (Annotations by L. Danner)

It will be 61 years the last of this April since we left Bennington.  I don’t remember how we traveled from Bennington to Albany but I remember crossing the Hudson on a ferry boat as well as though it were yesterday and the trip on a canal boat to Chittenango where a number of their Vermont friends had settled.  We staid there a little while then went to Canastota down near that awful swamp which at that time extended for miles and miles, a breeding place for fevers of all kinds.  The fogs and smells that arose from it were things to be remembered and there father (Abiel Blanchard) finished his work and his wanderings.  Before the letter sent to Uncle Amos (Blanchard) telling him of father’s death  (on 28 August 1850) could have reached him, one came from him telling of the death of the youngest brother Theodore, leaving but four living of that large family.  Uncle Theodore never married, he was a professor in some school or college.  Uncles Amos and Ralph wrote good letters to mother, they both advised her to go back to Dorset but for reasons that I wrote to Eva (Butler) didn’t go.  I think too she wanted to see her mother and sisters once more.  So when the girls got able to travel we piled onto a canal boat again and set sail for Buffalo.  It was late in Nov. and beginning to be cold.  The Captain of the boat was making his last trip for the season and he wanted as big a load as possible.  He already had a boatload of Swiss emigrants but he gave up nearly all of his cabin to mother and carried us and our belongings very cheap only $12.00 for the trip.  Oh the miseries of that trip.  I snowed and rained.  The mud was deep, the poor horses just plodded along.  It seemed to be about all they could do to pull their feet out of the mud.  The days were short, of course canal boats only ran by daylight, tying up every night.  We were laid up one day by the crew of the boat getting in a fight with the crew of another boat by the means of which some of the men were badly injured so the Captain had to hurry around and get other men.  I remember those men with their clothes nearly torn off and so covered with blood that they didn’t look like men.  So it took six days to make the trip that now could probably be made in as many hours.