October 23, 2025: Erie Canal Studying: Ely Parker

[On October 26, 1825, the Erie Canal officially opened. So this week, I’ll honor the 200^th anniversary of that huge & hugely important project by highlighting a handful of figures connected to it, leading up to a special weekend tribute to my favorite current civil engineer!]

On two ways to think about a Renaissance American’s contributions to the Canal.

First things first: I’ve written about the amazing Ely Parker (1828-1895) many times in this space, including this January post on the Erie Canal but also this one on Parker himself, this brief one begging for a biopic, this one on Ulysses S. Grant’s friends, and likely others I’m not remembering right now. I’d love if you could check out those prior posts, and then come on back for a couple further thoughts on the Canal connections in particular.

Welcome back! Ely Parker was such a badass Renaissance dude that he only enrolled at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) to study civil engineering when the New York Supreme Court refused to accept him to the New York bar as he could not gain U.S. citizenship; all of this, by the way, took place before his 20^th birthday. Despite that professional setback Parker would spend the next couple decades continuing to fight (alongside the activist white lawyer and future New York Attorney General John Martindale) for Seneca land rights, winning a series of important legal victories in the process. But I also have to believe that the proximity of his shift to civil engineering makes clear that he likewise thought of that profession (much like yesterday’s subject Canvass White did) as a way to serve his local communities, and thus that his appointment as the Erie Canal’s resident engineer in Rochester was far from a coincidence (that hyperlinked article makes the same point at great length).

Yet it’s important to note that that’s not the only way we could link Parker’s canal work to his Native American community. As I discussed at length in this post, toward the end of his life Parker both received extensive criticism from fellow Native Americans on and himself expressed doubts about his work as (for example) President Grant’s Commissioner of Indian Affairs. I don’t think for a second that any part of Parker’s career and life can overshadow his lifelong dedication to his communities, most especially his tribal one; but at the same time any 19^th century Native American who worked with the federal government was, to put it simply but not inaccurately, aiding and abetting the enemy. Given what the Erie Canal, like any mammoth public transportation project, meant for many local communities, it’s fair to say that Parker’s connection to it represents another complicated, multilayered side of this fraught, fascinating, foundational figure.

Last Canal context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?