Ben Franklin's world is a production of the

Omaha Institute. Hello and welcome to episode 247 of Ben Franklin's world.

The podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and events of our early American past have shaped the present day world

we live in.

And I'm your host, Liz Kovart.

Last week was a lot of fun, wasn't it? We were in Montreal, visited the Chateau

de R'Ransé. We explored really interesting early American histories. And this week, we're back on the road to explore more interesting early American Histories.

Now we're traveling south on the Canadian Otter Route 15 and then south on I-87, right down the

Champlain in Hudson River Corridor.

This is a really beautiful and scenic drive.

I've done it before.

And if you have time, I recommend stopping at the Crown Point State Historic

site in Crown Point, New York,

and at Fort Ticonderoga in Ticonderoga, New York.

But our drive today is going to take us further south, to a town called Fort Hunter, New York.

Now, Fort Hunter is located approximately four hours south of Montreal, and it's where we'll find the Scowhery Crossing State Historic Site, a historic site dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of the Erie Canal.

We first visited this site back in episode 28 in 2015 and we visited because I had really fond memories of researching Eerie Canal who I worked on my dissertation, which was a cultural history of Albany, New York and the broader northeast.

The Erie Canal really changed the economy, demography, and landscape of Albany.

And I had a lot of fun tracking down the different peoples and towns

vying to get their town placed on the canal route.

In fact, one of those towns was Albany's upper river rival, Troy.

Troy didn't like the fact that Albany would be the eastern terminus of the canal. So it sent petition after petition. the

...