Trade by the Lake: Waterford

Season 2 Episode 1 | 28m 48sVideo has Closed Captions

History of Lake Erie' industry and mercantile.

History of Lake Erie’s industry and mercantile happenings from salt, fishing, and trade with some reflection on how business has shaped our shorefront and the ecology under the water. Since the beginning, this region has provided goods that were highly sought after like salt, lumber, and fish.

Aired 11/03/2023

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Chronicles is a local public television program presented by WQLN

Trade by the Lake: Waterford

Season 2 Episode 1 | 28m 48sVideo has Closed Captions

Aired 11/03/2023

Problems with Closed Captions? Closed Captioning Feedback

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Chronicles is made possible by a grant from the Erie Community Foundation, a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, support from Springhill Senior Living, and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen. This is WQLN. Humans have always congregated around waterways as a source of life-giving drink and a method of transport. These flowing highways allowed resources to be shared between tribes and nations. Even here in Erie County, the origins of our cities and towns lie along the shores of our lakes and rivers. [MUSIC PLAYING] Two centuries ago, the Erie Triangle looked a little different. It wasn't centered where Erie would be on the Bayfront, but rather farther south in the thriving town of Waterford. Well, in the beginning, Waterford was bigger than Erie. Waterford was definitely surveyed and laid out before Erie was, not by much, a couple of months. But the surveying crew of Ebernezer Denny, they come up from Pittsburgh and they stop at Waterford and they start laying out the streets and everything here. There's more here at that time, the Eagle Hotel, which still stands. At one time, that was where business was done here in Erie County, all kinds of business. Trade in the area around Lake LeBoeuf thrived with the abundance of natural resources available nearby. From beaver and deer hides to salt and trees, Waterford provided a seemingly endless supply of goods to the colonizers, who had already exploited the resources of their own lands back in Europe. Why are people colonizing other places on the globe? It's basically to exploit the natural resources that are out there. It's a lot cheaper economically if you own the resources than if you purchase the resources. So if I'm going to come over and colonize North America, I've just, I now own whatever is there, the natural resources, and it makes a lot cheaper. Europe had been wiped out.

They had no forests, no trees, no critters, and one of the things that they found here in great quantity were furs, and all kinds of furs, not just beavers. Beavers were super popular because they became beaver hats. You look around today and you see lots of people wearing ball caps or whatever. Think of it like that.

But more, almost everybody in the 18th century is wearing some type of head cover or hat. These hats are made of felt, most of them. Think about your dryer when you clean out the lint trap. That's the beginnings of felt, that lint that you collect off of there. Very interesting.

So beaver pelts have two different types of hairs. So what they found out is that the beaver hair has a very unique design to it that it has all these little barbules if you look at it on a microscope, at the end of each of the hairs. So when you boiled it and then pounded it to make your felt, those little barbules lock in very hard and give you a very tough, resilient quality of fur felt to make a hat. So they were always on this search for the ultimate animal fur that would make the best hat because that's what's driving a lot of commercial endeavors is fashion, believe it or not. ♪ But that don't do it, yeah ♪ It's a billion dollar a year business in Europe, these hats. Some European countries actually have laws on the books at this time where you cannot be outside on the street without a head covering. One by one, when the Europeans got here, they were interested in seeing what they could do to gather up the riches of this land. They had no idea how to catch furs, but they knew that the Native Americans, Native Canadians, knew how to do that. European powers came over, they're like, "Okay, you have stuff we want. You have beaver hides, you're making these deer hides, we could really use those.

" And the Native cultures were like, "Well, you have nothing that we need. We have everything we provide for ourselves.

" Like, "Oh, yeah, but you know what?

We have something better.

" So you know that clay pot that your wife dropped and busted? This one won't.

And so they started introducing goods that basically replaced what they were pulling from nature. Metallurgy was not something that was done a whole lot over here. And steels, they brought them, they introduced them, and they're like, "Wow, I don't have to sit down and take a lot of time to chip out a flint blade.

" And it's a little more durable, a lot more durable. And then the other thing that they brought with them was, obviously, the firearm. Okay, the introduction of muskets and rifles was a big hit with the Natives. To the Europeans, these items are dollar store things that are mass produced in Europe. And the beaver trade is a market that just almost overnight just explodes. And water becomes the way that you move goods. You can move a ton of stuff relatively easy with water. You don't need a secondary source. For LaBoeuf, to get materials here, they had different little trade houses set up along the way that were basically supply depots. And then you'd have people who would take it from this depot to the next depot, little store houses. In the Lake Erie region of Chautauqua County, where Barcelona is, that was another drop-off point, and they would portage the materials from Barcelona to Chautauqua Lake. And at Chautauqua Lake, they had another outpost, French outpost. They had a French hospital, they had a canoe yard, Jamestown, New York. And so what they used, they used Chautauqua Lake as a staging point because that was another easy route into the Allegheny River. So they'd go down from Chautauqua Lake to the Chateadakoin to the Allegheny River, and then they could reach all the outposts that they needed to. Somebody in the French military defied orders and said, "I'm going to explore a little further west," and discovered that there's a protected bay. It's easier to unload ships there. At the beach there in what is today Westfield was not very conducive to pulling in ships and unloading ships. So that's why that was picked, that's why it was selected to be Erie instead of that location. But originally it was going to be Westfield. And where there's trade and transport for it, there's profit to be made. While the Native Americans only took what they needed, the European settlers saw a chance for fame and fortune, with growing demand for fashionable furs over hunting proliferated. One early entrepreneur in the Beaver Trade became America's first millionaire, John Jacob Astor. (gentle music) The beaver in North America, they're almost brought to the brink of extinction and two major reasons why. One is this fur trade. And the other is just like furs took off, so did tobacco. This is a plant that was unknown until the Columbian Exchange and almost overnight becomes the rage of your orbit. Everybody is using tobacco. Men and women and children are using tobacco. And it's one of those things that's used for recreation. There are also people prescribing it for illnesses. You go to the apothecary and they might give you something to try and smoke. Tobacco takes a lot of land. It takes a certain type of land. It doesn't like to sit in water. And so if you're going to get a piece of land that you're gonna farm for tobacco and there's any wetlands or beavers there that dammed up and ponded up a small portion of it, you're gonna want to eradicate them and keep them away. So these two things together are going to almost eradicate them from North America entirely. - There's a difficult balance between what's good for us environmentally and what's good for us commercially and monetarily. And I think many times money wins. And if you look back through history, I think money has always tried to prevail or that's the big thing. And unfortunately, not all the little people on the forefronts that are working for that are the ones that are seeing the gains. It's the people on the higher end that are receiving those. And so as we move through history, it's all about the land grab. It's all about where can I get more territory? How can I get more resources to use? And I think when you progress through colonial times and into the 19th century, nobody's thinking about the repercussions of what's gonna happen to the environment once we're done with all this. And I think that's the point that people have to remember that we are dealing now with things that happened in the past. So our current troubles and issues are not so much what's happening today, it's what's happened in the past. - As word spread about the profitable lands along the Great Lakes, more and more settlers moved to the region. One notable name arrived here from Connecticut in 1797, Judah Colt. Colt became a land agent of the Pennsylvania Population Company, a powerful position if you want to influence local trade and commerce. - Towards the end of the 18th century, the Revolutionary War comes to a conclusion and now these states who had these old boundary lines are now confused. Who owns what's known as the Erie Triangle? If you drive north, south through our county, you'll come to these roadside plaques that say old state line or old state road. That was the boundary line of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania went straight across the top. Once the federal government has the triangle, now there's going to be litigation between who is going to take ownership of it. New York lays a claim to it. Pennsylvania wants it. Connecticut lays a claim to it. Massachusetts lays a claim to it. It goes to court and eventually it works itself out to where the federal government is going to sell the triangle to the state of Pennsylvania. One of the concessions is going to be what's known as the Western Reserve. Connecticut is going to get lands for giving up their claim along Lake Erie. They're gonna gain land in what's known as the Western Reserve, which is the north western part of Ohio. That's why when you drive through Ohio, some of those little towns in northwestern Ohio today, they look very New England-like when they're set up. That's because they were inhabited by people from Connecticut. In comes Judah Colt. Judah Colt wants to purchase land in the triangle. He's from Connecticut. So he goes down to Pittsburgh to file the paperwork to get, to purchase some land. Colt learns that the guy who was the land agent just quit. So they say, we'll sell you the land you want, if you want, if you'll become the land agent. Now this is giving the fox the keys to the hen house. He comes here and he sees what's going on. What's going on here is Seth Reed came from Connecticut thinking, oh, here's a place for me to get started. And the Reed family is endemic with Erie wealth and development, shipping, whatever. And he thinks maybe Reed made a mistake and maybe he didn't. So Reed gets to Presque Isle and he sees that there's a little funky way to get into this beautiful bay, but there's no real channel. And you'd have to know exactly what you're doing to get through there. And you'd have to have something that didn't draw more than three or four or five feet, especially in the shoulder seasons, spring and fall. Colt thinks if there's gonna be a harbor here, it's gonna be at Four Mile Creek, just outside of the channel. At Four Mile Creek, where it goes in the water. And maybe another even better place would be at Freeport, which is at Six Mile Creek. And if I owned Four Mile Creek and Six Mile Creek, and I looked up the top of the Appalachian escarpment, which is 1700 feet above sea level at that point. If I owned that, I would be able to build a road and I would be able to take stuff from either of those places to the top. And when he's up there taking a look, French Creek is running right along his ankles and he thinks, French Creek, the Allegheny River, the Ohio River, I'm trading with whoever I want in the south. So he builds a trading post up there. The first road ever in Erie County is going to be route 19, which is the portage from the French Fort to the French Fort here. That's the first road. It was an ancient Indian trail. The second road is going to be from Freeport Beach to Colt Station, which is right there at that intersection of 430. A year after Judah Colt establishes the station, he's going to extend that road one more mile south to a little place today known as Little Hope. And so Judah Colt was sent here to sort all of that stuff out and then eventually help sell the land, which is today the city. He's selling parcels of land there. He's also going to be supplying people with the commodities, the goods that they need in order to come to a place like this in the wilderness to settle. And one of those things is going to be salt. He's going to be selling salt there. Salt's going to be the thing that's going to bring people to the area. The salt, it was entombed underneath the Great Lakes. Nobody knew much about it until people started drilling, looking for oil and gas, which had been discovered over in Pennsylvania near Oil City and other places. And while they started poking down there around here in Ohio, when they got to about 1800 feet below the surface, they didn't get oil, they got salt. There were areas in the Great Lakes where you would have natural salt licks or salt deposits. And it wouldn't be quite as concentrated at this, but you would get a salty material, which if you boiled it down, you could actually get the salt that you would use, which is incredibly important in production of food and particularly preserving food, because it's an essential component of drying meats and drying fishes so that you can resuscitate them with oils later on and eat them. So a really important commodity. - Unless you go to the market or have access to a market that's close enough that you can go every day to get your food, you really need a way to preserve that food. And in the 18th century, you're drying it with salt. - It's why nobody got to be 80 years old in the old days, because everybody was consuming massive amounts of salt. And they all had strokes and hypertension or whatever. And the way you preserved your food was you would take sawdust, and there was various formulas for that and mix it with salt. And salt would come here before we figured out how to get it from underneath Lake Erie at Whiskey Island. And we would take it to Pittsburgh where they didn't have any salt and bring back the coal. So salt one way, coal the other way, but when they discovered salt in Pittsburgh, then they didn't need us anymore. - You have people here, like the home that we're sitting in here of William Judson, he's gonna be involved in the salt trade, hearkening back to the days of the fur trade. How can we get south again? In the very early period, they're gonna use the same route that the fur traders used. They're gonna portage things here to Waterford. They're gonna load them onto flat boats here in the LeBoeuf Lake, and they're gonna float them down to Pittsburgh. And that's before the canal. (upbeat music) - In comes the era of canals, connecting inland waterways like the Great Lakes and the Hudson and the Ohio Rivers. The Erie Extension Canal provided a far smoother and faster path from Erie to Pittsburgh than the rivers did. What an opportunity for expanding trade in a thriving port town. - The early 1800s was a time that canals really became big in Northwest PA, Northeast Ohio. The Erie Canal across the state of New York had been built and was thriving, and westward expansion was a big trend in the area. - You have a guy in New York, he's the mayor of New York, his name is Clinton. He'll eventually become the governor of New York. And he has this idea of creating this canal. The government wants nothing to do with it, and that's gonna become a good thing. The presidents at the time, you have Jefferson and then you have Madison, they don't want anything to do with this endeavor. They don't think it's worthy. He's eventually able to raise the money and he builds this canal, which is like 360 some odd miles long. - There was already a canal being built from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, the mainline canal, they called that. As we watched the years march on, Clinton built Clinton's ditch, so you could land in New York, go up the Hudson River, then down the Erie Canal to Buffalo, then from Buffalo you're in Lake Erie and you're heading for wherever you want. - What they wanted was a canal to connect the Pittsburgh area to the Great Lakes. So that enabled industries in Pittsburgh to be able to transport and trade things up to the Great Lakes. - You can't always rely on French Creek or you can't rely on the LeBoeuf Creek. It's seasonal. This canal is more reliable, so let's extend it. So there's gonna be this extension canal that's gonna cut through the city of Erie, west through the west county, like places like Girard and Platea and head south towards Pittsburgh, because once you get to Pittsburgh, now you're on deep water, you've got the Allegheny, you've got the Ohio and you're on deep water again. - The problem they found was that as this canal was going north up to Lake Erie, there was a high spot just west of Conneaut Lake. It's called Summit Township and it's called Summit Township for the reason that it's the summit. And so the canal water can't flow upstream and so they needed to figure out a way that the canal could have a smooth path from Pittsburgh to Erie. And what they did, they went north of Meadville, they diverted some water from French Creek and they created what is called the French Creek Feeder Canal. And then it went up to Conneaut Lake. - You know, it's kind of interesting to compare the history of Erie in Cleveland, because there was a time when Erie was far larger than this quiet little metropolis behind us. One of the things that really changed the fortune of Cleveland was the establishment of a canal that joined Lake Erie to the Ohio River drainage. So when we take a look at Lake Erie, whether your vantage point is Presque Isle or whether it's the mouth of the Cuyahoga right beside us here, it turns out, oh, there's the Mark Barker. And I believe it just filled its holds this morning at the Cargill Mine and it's filled with salt. And it'll be taking that salt to other ports for distribution within the Great Lakes. It's also interesting to see the importance of the Cuyahoga River as a highway, if you will, for commerce, because it was originally the Ohio and Erie Canal had its start here that you could take that canal system all the way down to the Ohio River. And it was one of the things that really put Cleveland on the map because it was this amazing zone of commerce that connected the Ohio River system to the Great Lakes. Because once you're in the Great Lakes, you can go to Erie, go to Buffalo, go to Detroit. Once you got it here, you could take it down the canals all the way to the Ohio River and beyond. - Once the canal comes, then there's this idea, oh, this canal, which was supposed to be a failure, which actually came in not only under budget, but on time because the government wasn't involved in it, and it opens up new markets. This is when the fish industry and the salt trade explode. - Times were changing. Colt had taken a strong stance in lobbying for the federal government to improve the Erie bayfront and Presque Isle, making the town more desirable for business opportunities. Other changes too brought the newly designated Borough of Erie to the forefront. The Erie Extension Canal now flowed from the bay through Western Erie County, south to Pittsburgh, bypassing Waterford. There were some hard choices ahead for those who built their lives on the former trade hub. - We think about how rivers are highways, if you will, that can bring people together. And particularly when this continent was opening up to those of European descent, they were the main ways to get around. But it's also curious that in the city of Cleveland, as it's developed, this was also a major divide, because before you have all these bridges that connect the east side to the west side, there was in fact a huge divide between the two sides of the city. Ohio City here and Cleveland over there. Cleveland ultimately would annex Ohio City. But so rivers bring us together, rivers keep us apart. - And so people like Colt, people like the Judson's and Reed's, they have this dilemma because when they were here, they were hands on with their business. They were able to see their warehouses and touch their warehouses and supervise that. But now the canal's an Erie and it bypasses, it goes to the west of Waterford. So these people have a dilemma. You're gonna get into Erie, you're gonna stay overnight and then you're gonna come back. Why not just move there? And so some of these people are going to take up residence in Erie to be closer to their industries and their businesses. That's just the way economics works. In economics and in history, there's this idea of how cities form. And you gotta think of like a bullseye. And the middle of the bullseye, that's the city. That's the center of the city. That's where business and commerce and everything takes place. And then when you get out here to Waterford, these things kind of fade away and we become not the city or the town, the focal point, the bullseye, but we become what supports the city, the hinterland. (soft music) (soft music) Chronicles is made possible by a grant from the Erie Community Foundation, a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, support from Springhill Senior Living and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen. We question and learn. We here at Chronicles love bringing you in-depth stories about the Lake Erie region. And while we originally planned on airing an hour long episode tonight in true documentary form, sometimes things change and we go where the story takes us. We hope you enjoyed the first part of Trade on the Lake and we hope that you tune in next week for the second half of the episode. Thank you for your continued support. Please enjoy this episode from season one now.

Chronicles is a local public television program presented by WQLN