Rich History Revealed In Canal Walking Tour

Aaron Goode pointed down to the 19th century trap rock retaining walls that still line the Farmington Canal Trail in Dixwell, and then up to the 21st century Yale-dorm-topping carved relief panels that pay homage to the enduring transportation corridor’s founding engineers.

“History is everywhere in New Haven,” he said, ​“above us and below.”

That wealth of local history was on full display Friday during a two-and-a-half-mile walking tour that Goode, the founder of a group called the New Haven Friends of the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail, led as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. The walk was co-sponsored by the New Haven Preservation Trust.

As the afternoon temperature climbed into the high 80s, roughly 15 attendees donned hats and sunglasses and braved the heat to explore the canal-to-railway-to-pedestrian-and-bike-path’s two centuries’ worth of history. 

Goode led the group from Willian Lanson Plaza on Lock Street, down to the Phase IV construction site at Temple Street, past the former Winchester Arms factory complex-turned-Science Park lab and office buildings on Munson Street, and then up to the Newhallville Learning Corridor and pollinator garden off of Shelton Avenue.

Taking place just a few weeks after trail advocates celebrated the 200th anniversary of the chartering of the canal in May 1822, Goode noted that the 85-mile linear park — which stretches, nearly unbroken, from New Haven to Northampton, Mass. — represents ​“two centuries of extraordinarily rich transportation history.”

Much of which is concentrated in a several-mile stretch that runs through the heart of New Haven.

As Tom Thurston of the Amistad Committee and Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition put it towards the start of the walk, ​“History is part of the infrastructure of a place.” 

Learning that history not only keeps that past alive. It also strengthens the bonds between New Haveners, visitors, and the built and natural environment they share int the present.

Wooster Square resident Elsie Chapman expressed that same sentiment two hours later at the end of the walk, as she explored remnants of the canal’s original train tracks peeking out from beneath overgrown vegetation just north of Hazel Street. 

“That’s why these tours are so amazing,” she said as she ran her foot along the iron rail. So much of this previously hidden history suddenly, and irreversibly, comes to into view.

"We Want What New York Is Having"

The walking tour began at around 1:30 p.m. on Lock Street near the statue of William Lanson, an artistic tribute to the pioneering Black engineer, entrepreneur, and civil rights activist that was long championed by the Amistad Committee, sculpted by Dana King, and installed in September 2020.

Lanson played a key role in the earlier years of the canal’s history back in the 1820s, Thurston explained. That’s because he led a group of roughly two dozen African American workmen in building the retaining walls of the New Haven section of the canal. He also oversaw the extension of the city’s long wharf by roughly 1500 yards. Those two engineering feats boosted New Haven’s economy by creating a commercial seaport that could be accessed by large ships, and by connecting that port to ​“Connecticut’s hinterlands” and its farmers and textile manufacturers.

Goode and Farmington Canal Rail-To-Trail Association President Lisa Fernandez pointed out that the carved stone and trap rock walls that the tour attendees could sit on and touch dated back to the 1830s — a material marker that connects the canal’s past and present. Not only did Lanson help lead the construction of the canal, Goode said, the stone used for its walls also came from quarries he owned in East Rock and what is now Fair Haven Heights.

The canal itself was built between 1822 and 1828, Goode said, during a time of national ​“canal frenzy, canal fever” in the wake of the tremendous economic and transportation success of New York’s Erie Canal several years earlier.

To paraphrase When Harry Met Sally, Goode said, Connecticut investors and business leaders looked to the Erie Canal and said: ​“We want what New York is having.”

Goode said that Benjamin Wright, a Connecticut resident and the lead engineer of the Erie Canal, was hired by New Haven business leaders like James Hillhouse and Eli Whitney to serve as the surveyor for the nascent Farmington Canal. 

The goal, he was, was for this new canal to siphon off some of the commercial traffic that Hartford and Middletown had thanks to the Connecticut River.

Due to persistent droughts and sabotaging farmers and a host of other problems, Goode said, the Farmington Canal went bust only two decades after the commercial waterway was opened. Almost immediately after becoming financially insolvent, the canal was transformed — in part by many of the same people who founded it two decades ago — into a freight railroad.

That railroad was in place from 1848 to the 1960s, Goode said, when the latest innovation in American infrastructure — highways and trucking — drove the rail line into obsolescence. 

Some of the canal’s and rail line’s earliest history, Goode pointed out, is commemorated in carved relief panels visible towards the top of Yale’s adjacent Benjamin Franklin College.

One such panel shows canal-railway engineers Joseph Sheffield and Alexander Catlin Twining — the latter of whom is the great-great grandfather of Alex Twining, one of the lead developers of a large new mixed-use complex called ​“Winchester Green” that is slated to be built Winchester Avenue in Science Park.

In the 1980s, as the state was looking to auction off the right of way of the former rail line to the highest bidders, a group of far-sighted activists convinced the state to convert to preserve the former rail line instead to be converted into a linear park. 

Fernandez said that Hamden and Cheshire were the first towns to invest in making their stretches of the rail line into the walking and biking path it is today. Those conversions proved so popular that other municipalities, like New Haven in the 2000s, followed suit.

The Farmington Canal Trail now covers 54 miles in Connecticut, Fernandez said, with just 12 miles still to be built towards the center of the state. Across state lines, the canal trail extends all the way to Northhampton, Mass.

The next stop on the tour was a few blocks to the south, where Goode showed the group the construction site for Phase IV of the Farmington Canal Trail. That will see the off-road path extended from its current southern terminus on Temple Street down to Grove Street, where it will go above ground and at street-grade level to Olive Street and Water Street as it makes its way down to Long Wharf.

Having the canal trail path go onto street level and essentially become a bike lane is ​“not optimal,” Goode said. But, given that the actual historic canal-rail line has been filled in and is inaccessible by the FBI building on Grove Street, ​“that’s what we could get.”

Longtime East Rock resident and former Wilbur Cross High School teacher Dina Pollock marveled at the stretch of the canal trail leading down to Temple Street. She said she had walked by this part of the trail many times, but from up at street level. She always assumed that this stretch was owned by and belonged to Yale. Now that she knows that it’s open to the public, she said, she plans on coming back to this stretch again and again in the future.

Winchester To Winstanley Economy

Goode then led the group up to the former Winchester Arms factory complex area near Munson Street — stopping along the way for walking tour attendees to peer into a historical diorama and viewing box built by Escape New Haven.

At Munson Street, Goode explained that the Winchester Repeating Arms factory used to employ one in four New Haveners. It was the largest taxpayer in the city. Now the area is filled with Yale offices and lab buildings. The largest taxpayer in the city now, he said, besides the utility company United Illuminating, is Winstanley — a real estate development firm that specializes in lab buildings, and works closely with Yale University.

“We’ve gone from a Winchester economy to a Winstanley economy,” he said.

The last stop on the tour was up at the Learning Corridor at Shelton Avenue and Hazel Street.

The group was greeted by urban environmentalist and Learning Corridor pioneer Doreen Abubakar.

She explained how she helped lead the transformation of the blighted former ​“mud hole” into an active community space, replete with chairs and benches, a water fountain, exercise equipment, bikes, and, nearby, a native plant nursery.

Click here and here to learn more about other upcoming events celebrating the canal’s bicentennial. Click here for a full calendar of events taking place during this year’s Arts & Ideas festival.