Where and When: Heaven's Ditch

It was President's Day and the spa was completely booked up. so my friend and I headed to the other Spa, Saratoga.  There is a wonderful new local bookstore on Broadway, across from the restored Adelphi where we had oysters and charcuterie at the bar for lunch, were I lost Pat as I headed to the history section.  There I purchased a couple of books, the better of the two reprised herein.

Heaven's Ditch - Gold Gold and Murder on the Erie Canal by Jack Kelly (not the Maverick one) appealed to me as (1) local history and (2) a construction project.  (Sideline it is Brett and not Bart that otherwise appeals to me.)

What I didn't count on getting was an extensive history of central NY religious fanaticism.  The gold in the book is not the profitability of canal commerce, but the golden tablets Joseph Smith "dug" and therefrom established Mormonism.  He was not the only such founder in the area that saw an epidemic of new faiths:  Seventh Day Adventists and Anti Masonic political fever, the gullibility preyed upon by both Barnum and Weed himself as a rag newspaper man.

I loved the engineering challenges and creativity recorded in the book.  Loved finding the roots of Thurlow Weed who dominated both my recently read books on Jackson, Lincoln and Grant.  Instead of doing what I have been doing lately on the title page of my books -- citing page numbers of meaningful quotes and sections I underlined -- someone opening the Canal will find a list of names, names that if I were a school marm back in those days, I would have thoroughly enjoyed, and struggled not to titter, when reading a roster of "Obidiah Dogberry, Orestes Brownson, Enos Thropp, Lowton Lawson, Hamlet Scranton, Ebenezer Hatch, Parly Pratt, Orange Dibble."  Wouldn't you just love to ancestry.com these folks for extended family trees?  Makes me wish I heard of them when I was using college classmate names on sample driver licenses I inserted into procedural manuals when I worked at DMV.

Tent preaching and a fad of digging for buried treasures portray not only the community entertainment of the age and area but the gullibility of the mass population ... a population that by class was suspicious of the more educated and prosperous who tended to fulfill their own affiliation needs by becoming Masons.

This is a marvelous history book for New Yorkers,  Most of whom solely associate a mule named Sal with the Canal, not the native ingenuity generated as the terrain changed from the Montezuma Swamp to the Finger Lakes dolomite.  It documents the political ties with the NYS Assembly and the Canal Commission and the need for day laborers, mostly Irishmen from the five corners in NYC, bringing an entire new transient working class into the population of farmers, traders and ministry.

The book made me want to travel through the canal now just to slowly soak in the varying terrain of the State instead of speeding along the Thruway.  It also made me think again about State infrastructure investments that end up being unprofitable, decaying remnants of industries which speed by them with never ending technological advancements.

Why doesn't the NYS Education Department require history fairs like science fairs?  Let each child in school read a book like this one and report out to the class what hooked him/her about learning more about the State.