The Erie Canal was only a year old when Matilda Joslyn Gage was born in 1826. This seven million dollar waterway, extending for 360 miles from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, was an influence that shaped the life of everyone living in upstate New York, including the “forgotten feminist of Fayetteville,” Matilda Joslyn Gage.

When the Erie Canal was constructed, it passed within one mile of Fayetteville. Recognizing an economic opportunity, enterprising businessmen John McViccar, Hervey Edwards and Seymour Pratt led efforts to construct a feeder to connect Fayetteville’s business district with the new canal. A dam (below the Town of Manlius Office Building) was built on Limestone Creek to divert water from the creek to the feeder and on to the main canal. This enabled the feeder to provide water not only for maintenance of the Erie Canal and but also to permit navigation between the canal and the village. In 1836, when the Erie Canal was enlarged, the feeder was broadened and deepened so that Erie barges could transport goods to and from downtown Fayetteville and a larger dam was constructed on Limestone Creek to increase the water flow. A boat lock to raise and lower water levels, and a canal extension, facilitated carrying the important feeder and its traffic south to the business district (where State Route 5 now crosses Limestone Creek).

By 1849 another artificial canal had been completed from Limestone Creek near Manlius to upper Fayetteville, bringing the water in at a high enough level that its 100-foot fallback to the creek furnished power for several mills. Lots were drawn for factory locations and sawmills, flourmills, paper mills, and other industries were begun. In addition to the hydraulic canal, the Fayetteville Hydraulic Company constructed Bishop Brook waterway, which also ran through the village delivering waterpower to industries, but it was underground, in a wooden flume.

The reservoir for Ledyard Dyke, with its round pond, island in the center and smaller island behind, is now Huntington Beard Memorial Park, created by public spirited citizens who purchased the property when it was in danger of being sold for development. The reservoir provided water on demand to five mills, including McIntyre’s Paper Mill, which is still in operation at the bottom of Clinton Street, across from Limestone Creek.

Before the Erie Canal was built, the most important route through Central New York was the Seneca Turnpike and, as a major stop along that road, Manlius had grown into the largest and most prosperous village in the county. The feeder canal helped accelerate the growth of Fayetteville; however, Manlius failed to build a canal to Fayetteville to share in the wealth brought by the Erie Canal.

Excluding the salt shipped from Syracuse, the number of tons of goods shipped out of Fayetteville “exceeds that shipped from any other port on the Erie Canal between Rochester and Albany,” declared the Canal Commissioners’ 1853 report. Fayetteville was “the place of deposit for the agricultural products of a large extent of the country, and from which very large shipments are made for transportation on all the canals of the state,” the report explained.

It was this lucrative canal traffic that lured merchant Henry Hill Gage from Manlius to Fayetteville, where he established a dry goods store in the lower village, close to the canal feeder. The scene outside his store was a lively one, with the canal barges unloading coal, hardware, and dry goods and loading up the products manufactured in the mills behind the Gage house: lime, lumber, barley flour, furniture, bundles of leather from the Fayetteville tannery and bales of alfalfa for canal boat horses and mules. When a feeder boat was loading, wagons would be lined up for blocks. Passengers climbed aboard the feeder packet boats to take pleasure and shopping trips to the city of Syracuse and beyond. During the season, regular boat service left Fayetteville at 8 a.m. and reached Syracuse at 10 a.m. Fare was 30 cents.

The Matilda Joslyn Gage Walking Tour of Fayetteville begins at the lower village site of Henry Gage’s general store (now a parking lot under the overpass) then proceeds up the hill through Fayetteville’s Historic District to the Gage House, past stately homes much as they were when the Gage family lived here. From the Gage home, the walk goes along pleasant residential streets to the cemetery where Gage is buried, past the old Stickley furniture factory (now the Fayetteville Free Library - the oldest part of the building dating to Gage’s time - and the Ledyard Dyke waterfalls which powered the factories. The holding pond at Beard Park is directly across the street from the cemetery. The homes of the factory workers still stand on the side streets, lovely cottages that have been restored by village residents. (The Matilda Joslyn Gage Walking Tour of Fayetteville is a joint project of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation, the Fayetteville Free Library and Barbara Rivette, town of Manlius and village of Fayetteville Historian.)

Back on Genesee Street after seeing Gage’s gravestone, visitors can follow Clinton Street down the hill past the McIntyre Paper Company, which has been in operation since the Gages moved to the village in 1854. In addition, after a quick five-minute drive, visitors can be walking again along the verdant canal towpath between DeWitt and the Green Lakes Widewater.

The Erie Canal has recreational significance as well. During the 1960s the Onondaga County Department of Planning designated the canal between DeWitt and the Green Lakes Widewater as “the single most valuable recreation resource in the Onondaga-Syracuse Metropolitan Area.”

The village of Fayetteville presents a rich interpretive history of the Erie Canal from the perspective of its most famous woman resident, Matilda Joslyn Gage. From the booming canal business that brought the Gage family to Fayetteville to the homes of the businessmen who funded the feeder canal on Genesee Street’s Historic District and the remnants of the Ledyard Dyke system and the factories it powered, to the worker’s homes and a 150-year-old manufacturing operation, visitors are able to experience a remarkably intact Erie Canal village and learn how it operated.

... by Sally Roesch Wagner