Catalyst Grant Final Report
“Women on the Water Walking Tours”
Please provide a brief narrative explaining your project and its outcomes.
From March to May, research was done at various archives throughout New York. Research was done at the University of Rochester and SUNY Oswego’s Special Collections on relevant women from the state who pushed back on their assigned role in society, specifically Caroline Ga-ha-no Parker Mountpleasant of the Tonawanda Band of the Seneca Nation and Dr. Mary Edwards Walker who was originally from Oswego, New York. Both of these visits were more successful than expected as there were mentions of the Erie Canal in both collections that were consulted. There was additional research done at the Onondaga Historical Association on local women who made strides for women’s rights in Syracuse.There was also research conducted internally using the Erie Canal Museum’s collections. This work proved to be useful for the tour, but showed us that there was a lot more research to be done within the Museum’s own collection. We were able to find information on women working on the canal and see some patterns in changes to women’s access to professional jobs. We have many objects and images that involve women in some way, but our current finding aids do not yet indicate that women are in all of these items successfully. As part of this project, the findings have been compiled into a research guide to help future researchers, but there are still many items to be added to that guide from our collection.
Once most of the research was complete, the tour was written. The tour took attendees from the Syracuse Weighlock Building to Clinton Square then on to Fayette Park with many stops along the way, including the sites of hotels that hosted conventions for women’s suffrage, places where suffragists gave speeches, and the site where Susan B. Anthony’s portrait was burned by people protesting her work. This walking tour covered how the Erie Canal changed life and work for women, sites where events occurred that helped to achieve suffrage, and a bit about the achievement of the 19th amendment and introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment.
We had some issues with attendance on the tours. On our first tour, in June, only five people attended. Before our July, August, and September tours we encouraged our partner organizations like the League of Women Voters to share the events with their audiences. This was successful in July and August when we had twenty-two and twenty-five attendees to each tour, respectively. Those are also the months in which our ads ran on WRVO. It was less successful in September when only four people registered, likely because we were competing with other local events like football games.
What is the most remarkable accomplishment or finding of your project?
In some of the research conducted for the creation of this tour, we found that there was a woman working in the Syracuse Weighlock Building, which houses the Erie Canal Museum, as a stenographer. Her name was Katherine B. Allis and she worked under weighmaster William O’Brien around 1910. She was listed in a payroll record as making $100 per month, while the locktenders in the same record were paid $50 per month and a female cook on the record was paid only $18 a month. We had some difficulty finding out much more about her beyond that she lived locally and attended Syracuse University. Despite that difficulty, Allis was a very interesting example of how the demands made by suffragists, like access to higher education for women and equal pay for equal work, actually changed the opportunities open to women in Syracuse.
The information about Allis was included in the research guide that we created. That research guide, which specifically relates to women on the Erie Canal, is an important achievement of this project as well because it provides foundational information and sources which can be given to researchers, partner organizations, or expanded upon by us internally as we continue to unfold the narrative of Erie Canal history with future projects. This research guide will provide a foundation for future investigations of marginalized populations along the Erie Canal.
How did your project differ from what you originally proposed?
The project turned out to be quite similar to what we proposed. There were no major problems in creating the tour. But it ended up being much more specific to Syracuse’s local history of women’s rights and how that centered on the canal, rather than on the history of women’s rights along the canal throughout New York State more generally. The project did differ from our expectations in that we have discovered there is much more historical research to be done on the topic in order to uncover more detailed information on the activities of local women’s groups and on participation in suffrage parades held in the city. Fortunately, we now have a foundation for that future research.
Please provide a brief summary of your evaluation activities and/or results, if available.
We typically consider attendance, feedback, and members who join as a result of a project when evaluating success. We had varied attendance over the four tours, though we had a total of 54 people attend the four tours, with three attendees in June, twenty-five in July, twenty-two in August, and four in September. We had to turn off online registrations for the July tour, knowing that not everyone registers ahead of time, in order to keep the size of our tour groups manageable for the intern. All of the feedback we received both verbally and in writing was overwhelmingly positive. Although there were fewer attendees for the September tour, one person joined as an Erie Canal Museum member after that tour. Additionally, many attendees who were from local communities reported that they had not come to the Erie Canal Museum in many years, but the new research and programming, like this tour, motivated them to visit the Museum again.
Natalie Stetson
Executive Director, Erie Canal Museum
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