Artist/Maker Walter M. Oddie (American, 1808 - 1865)

Erie Canal and Covered Bridge

1847

Oil on canvas

Overall: 31 x 45 x 1 in. ( 78.7 x 114.3 x 2.5 cm )

Purchase, Thomas Jefferson Bryan Fund

1981.10

The successful launching in 1807 of Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat had set the stage for commercial steam-driven river navigation on the Hudson River from New York City to Albany. The completion in 1825 of the Erie Canal extended this route west along the Mohawk River from Albany to Buffalo on the Great Lakes. A triumph of civil engineering, the Erie Canal was vital for the transportation of raw materials and goods as well as the development of the new\ industry of tourism. The canal not only facilitated tourist visits to Niagara Falls, but also provided a new picturesque route that engaged artists as well as travelers. Walter M. Oddie’s Erie Canal with Covered Bridge of 1847 depicts the waterways – manmade and natural – along whose course the canal was constructed. From an elevated perch, we survey the sinuous curve of the Mohawk River whose rapids and falls had been tamed for navigation by the course of the canal, seen running between the river and the tow paths and dominating the foreground. The Erie Canal was joined the mid-nineteenth century with the railroad, allowing canal passengers to speed their journeys overland. Oddie’s serene vista is actually an interlude in a nexus of what was then modern transportation signaled here in the various modes of navigating inland waterways. Open and covered bridges in the distance cross the winding passage of the river. In the foreground, the neat and narrow course of the canal is flanked by the tow paths serving mule teams harnessed to a barge. A single bare tree reminds us of the passage to ‘progress’ from the wilderness mountainside whose forested slopes were cleared and reshaped for the canal; as well as the river whose flow was regulated by a system of locks to serve commerce, industry and travel. Villages, towns and cities prospered along the canal’s course. Indeed, the Erie Canal was downtown Utica’s busiest ‘street’ in the nineteenth century; lined with forges and factories. Their products (stoves, furnaces and boilers) were carried on the canal to Albany for transport down the Hudson River to New York City or westward from Utica to Buffalo for shipping via the Great Lakes to the nation’s interior.

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