Using seldom-seen manuscripts from the New York State Archives from the first days of the Clinton's Ditch, Williams will provide an illustrated overview of how the people of New York State learned to survey, design, construct and operate this unparalleled engineering achievement. Who took the first shovel and where? Who did the rest of the shoveling? Once built, who was going to maintain it and how? New Yorkers were the first to undertake such a massive public works. As we are in the midst of the bicentennial of the Erie Canal, now is an especially good time to better appreciate this truly remarkable accomplishment.

Craig Williams is the vice president of the board of directors of the Canal Society of New York State. He retired in 2014 as senior historian at the New York State Museum in Albany, after more than thirty years of service. At the Museum, he helped lead efforts to document and preserve artifacts from the Willard Psychiatric Center, resulting in the much-acclaimed 2004 exhibition "Lost Cases, Recovered Lives - Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic". He coordinated the Museum's curatorial team at the World Trade Center site after the attacks of September 11, 2001 and in 2011 led the Museum's recovery of artifacts from the 1971 Attica Uprising. The largest historic artifact that he ever collected was the 1921 canal motorship, the "Day Peckinpaugh". This nearly three-hundred-foot-long vessel was headed in 2005 for a scrapyard near Erie, Pennsylvania. The "Peckinpaugh" was converted to a mobile exhibition gallery for 2009 Hudson-Fulton-Champlain Quadricentennial, traveling between Plattsburgh and New York City.

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