The Erie Canal in Erie County(from Cycling Along The Canals of New York State.)
Heading southwest on the Canalway Trail out of Niagara County, you’ll enter Erie County in the town of Amherst. The riding is a pleasant and picturesque as both the original Erie Canal and the barge canal use Tonawanda Creek. Nearly all of the Erie Canal between Amherst and Buffalo is closely paralleled by the recently improved Canalway Trail. Most of the trail is paved with a few small gaps and stone-dust segments. It is quite scenic, well-signed and easy to follow, and keeps you close alongside the canal. It is ten miles to the mouth of the Tonawanda Creek (the barge canal) at the Niagara River.
You will come to North Tonawanda and Tonawanda – two communities with a rich canal heritage. The paved Riverwalk trail starts at the barge canal in Tonawanda and goes to downtown Buffalo.
The Riverwalk runs along the Niagara River.
As you ride the Riverwalk, note the strong current in the Niagara River. The river, really a strait, is a major water link between Lakes Erie and Ontario as well as an international boundary between Canada and the United States.
Cycling along Riverwalk, you’ll go right by the federal lock, which guards the western entrance to the barge canal. This lock adjusts for wind-driven changes in the level of Lake Erie. You won’t be able to see the old Erie Canal; it is buried beneath the adjacent interstate highway.
In Buffalo, where the canal joins the waters of Lake Erie, stop for a moment and reflect on the achievement that the Erie Canal represents. New York State, emerging from more than a century of violent warfare, independently built a vast waterway, largely in stone, across a total wilderness. New York had sought help from the federal government; President Jefferson was said to have remarked: “It is a splendid project and may be executed in a century hence….but it is little short of madness to think of it in this day.”
In the 20th century, the state, now truly the Empire State (due in no small part to the Erie Canal), took it upon itself to enlarge that historic waterway at the same time that the federal government was constructing the Panama Canal. The Erie Barge Canal is ten times longer than the Panama and has many more structures, some of which are the largest of their kind ever built. While no longer important in the movement of goods, the Erie has reemerged as a unique and historic recreational resource, unparalleled in America. Maybe its heyday is yet to come.