Fraternity Weekend

Here's the crew I spent this past Saturday morning with:

The guys who are younger than I am are a bunch of students from the local chapter of Sigma Phi. The one guy older than I am is from a volunteer group who help maintain the local bike path. The stone wall behind us is part of a lock from the Erie Canal, built around 1839. We were there clearing away the bushes and weeds that overgrow the site every summer, as part of a restoration project organized by a colleague from the History department.

That's right, I spent my Saturday clearing brush. I feel all Presidential. I may just bomb something.

How hard a task was this? Well, here's the lock before we started:

And here's the lock after we were done:

The scale isn't the same, but pretty much the whole field of view was full of those sumac trees before we started. The damn things grow like weeds.

The Erie Canal, of course, is a huge part of New York history-- there's a whole chain of cities between Buffalo and Albany that are where they are because of the canal. The first version was built around 1820, and then expanded in 1840, when this lock was built. It stayed in service until 1918 or thereabouts, when it was abandoned.

Given that it was pretty much ignored for 80-odd years, the lock is in pretty good shape. The yellow hut on top of the main pier is a reconstruction from a few years ago, built by a former Civil Engineering professor who started the restoration project. The hope is to get it declared a historic site, and get the town of Rotterdam to come in with some serious equipment and clear the trees and bushes out a little more permanently, so some further reconstruction can be done, and the whole thing can be a small park.

Until then, the site gets cleared a couple of times a year by frat boys doing volunteer service, and any gullible faculty who happen to bike by when the cleanup is happening. Which was a fair bit of work, but not all that bad a way to spend a morning.

(Photo credits: Andy Morris)