e years 1827-1829, canal boat operators were not required to record or report passenger names to the government, which in this case was the State of New York. Those 1827-1829 passenger lists survive today in the New York State Archives.
It also helped bind the still-new nation closer to Britain and Europe. British repeal of the Corn Law resulted in a huge increase in exports of Midwestern wheat to Britain. Trade between the US and Canada also increased as a result of the Corn Law and a reciprocity (free-trade) agreement signed in 1854; much of this trade flowed along the Erie.
Its success also prompted imitation: a rash of canal building followed. Also, the many technical hurdles that had to be overcome made heroes of those whose innovations made the canal possible. This led to an increased public esteem for practical education.
Many notable authors wrote about the canal, including Herman Melville, Frances Trollope, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Samuel Hopkins Adams and the Marquis de Lafayette, and many tales and songs were written about life on the canal. The popular song Low Bridge by Thomas S. Allen was written in 1905 to memorialize the canal's early heyday, when barges were pulled by mules rather than engines. Chicago, among other Great Lakes cities, recognized the commercial importance of the canal to its economy, and two West Loop streets are named Canal and Clinton (for canal proponent DeWitt Clinton).
In 1918 the Canal was replaced by the larger New York State Barge Canal. The new canal replaced much of the original route, leaving many abandoned sections (most notably between Syracuse and Rome). New digging and flood control technologies allowed engineers to canalize rivers that the original canal sought to avoid, such as the Mohawk, Seneca and Clyde Rivers, and Oneida Lake. In sections which did not consist of canalized rivers (particularly between Rochester and Buffalo), the original Erie Canal channel was enlarged to wide and deep. The expansion allowed barges up to 2,000 tons to use the Canal. This expensive project was politically unpopular in parts of the state not served by the canal, and failed to save it from becoming obsolete.
The new alignment began on the Hudson River at the border between Cohoes and Waterford, where it ran northwest with five locks, running into the Mohawk east of Crescent. While the old Canal ran next to the Mohawk all the way to Rome, the new canal ran through the river, straightened or widened where necessary. At Ilion the new canal left the river for good, but continued to run on a new alignment parallel to both the river and the old canal to Rome. From Rome the new route continued almost due west, merging with Fish Creek just east of its entry into Oneida Lake.
From Oneida Lake, the new canal ran west along the Oneida River, with cutoffs to shorten the route. At Three Rivers the Oneida River turns northwest, and was deepened for the Oswego Canal to Lake Ontario. The new Erie Canal turned south there along the Seneca River, which turns west near Syracuse and continues west to a point in the Montezuma Marsh (). There the Cayuga and Seneca Canal continued south with the Seneca River, and the new Erie Canal again ran parallel to the old Canal along the bottom of the Niagara Escarpment, in some places running along the Clyde River, and in some places replacing the old Canal. At Pittsford, southeast of Rochester, the Canal turned west to run around the south side of Rochester, rather than through downtown. The Canal currently crosses the Genesee River at the Genesee Valley Park (). It then rejoins the old path near North Gates. From there it was again roughly an upgrade to the original canal, running west to Lockport and southwest to Tonawanda, where the new alignment simply emptied into the Niagara River.
Due to the growth of highways, railroads, and the Saint Lawrence Seaway, commercial traffic on the canal declined dramatically during the second half of the 20th century. Since the 1990s, the Canal system has been used primarily by recreational traffic, a