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Unlocking the Past Speaker Series: Navigating the Erie Canal during the first 200 years
| Date | Start time (90 minute cruise) | Presentation Topic | Presenter | Presentation Description |
| 6/11/25 | 5:30 PM | Friends of Mt Hope Cemetery | Nancy Uffindell, Board Member for FOMH Cemetery | Many permanent residents of Mount Hope Cemetery have connections to the Erie Canal. Owners of basins and boatyards, aqueduct builders, boat captains and people who traveled on the canal will be the focus of these presentations. |
| 6/25/25 | 5:30 PM | Pathway of Resistance: The Erie Canal and the Underground Railroad | Derrick Pratt, Director of Education at the Erie Canal Museum | This constantly evolving talk examines the experience of African-Americans along the Erie Canal Corridor, with a particular focus on the struggle for abolition. While parts of this story are unpleasant, slavery, racism, and resistance are critical to understanding our society today. |
| 7/9/25 | 5:30 PM | Friends of Mt Hope Cemetery | Nancy Uffindell, Board Member for FOMH Cemetery | Many permanent residents of Mount Hope Cemetery have connections to the Erie Canal. Owners of basins and boatyards, aqueduct builders, boat captains and people who traveled on the canal will be the focus of these presentations. |
| 7/16/25 | 5:30 PM | Fee Brothers & The Erie Canal: A History of Spirits | Jon Spacher, CEO & Owner of Fee Brothers | There’s a rich history of the intersection of spirits and the Erie Canal. 161-year old Fee Brothers was part of this history before prohibition. Learn from the 5th generation owner how these paths crossed and then went their separate ways as part of the canal’s 200 year anniversary! |
| 7/23/25 | 5:30 PM | The Dulcimer on the Western Erie Canal | Nils Caspersson, retired teacher and local folk musician | The dulcimer has an obscure past and is a mid-19th c. hybrid of craftsmanship and utility and is also linked to Lutheran immigrants. I will present a wide variety of Erie Canal area community instrumental music and stories, including Irish, English, French, Swedish, Norwegian and others, with the dulcimer, highlighting the diverse rural communities along the Western New York Erie Canal. |
| 8/13/25 | 5:30 PM | Friends of Mt Hope Cemetery | Nancy Uffindell, Board Member for FOMH Cemetery | Many permanent residents of Mount Hope Cemetery have connections to the Erie Canal. Owners of basins and boatyards, aqueduct builders, boat captains and people who traveled on the canal will be the focus of these presentations. |
| 8/27/25 | 5:30 PM | Aileen O’Malley’s Journey on the Erie Canal | Marilyn Higgins, Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor Volunteer | A recently published historic fiction book by Marilyn Higgins, “Dreams of Freedom, an Irishwoman’s story of love, justice and a young nation coming apart” covers the abolition movement, native displacement, women’s movement, and religious fervor of the Canal corridor from 1830-1865. |
| 9/10/25 | 5:30 PM | Friends of Mt Hope Cemetery | Nancy Uffindell, Board Member for FOMH Cemetery | Many permanent residents of Mount Hope Cemetery have connections to the Erie Canal. Owners of basins and boatyards, aqueduct builders, boat captains and people who traveled on the canal will be the focus of these presentations. |
| 9/14/25 | 3:30 PM | Friends of Mt Hope Cemetery-Walking tour prior | Nancy Uffindell, Board Member for FOMH Cemetery | Many permanent residents of Mount Hope Cemetery have connections to the Erie Canal. Owners of basins and boatyards, aqueduct builders, boat captains and people who traveled on the canal will be the focus of these presentations. |
| 9/24/25 | 5:30 PM | The Strategic and Military Implications of the Erie Canal | Michael Brown, Associate Professor of History at RIT | When in 1817 New York passed legislation to build the Erie Canal, anyone older than 54 would have been able to point to a map of its proposed route and recall that three wars had been fought in that area in their lifetime. It may have seemed possible, if not likely, that another conflict was only a matter of time. While the Erie Canal is most often remembered for its economic, social, and engineering dimensions, the military and strategic context of the canal is also crucial. As authorities in British Canada quickly recognized, a canal represents a redrawing of the map, and they undertook their own sweeping military engineering projects in response. Considering the military implications of the Erie Canal situates it in a larger history of strategic constructed waterways. The Suez and Panama canals and the Intracoastal Waterway are successors to the Erie Canal in affecting the geopolitical calculus of their eras. |