Craft Masonry in Oneida County, New York - Onondaga and ...

Your presence at the celebration will be highly gratifying to your numerous friends, and to none
more than to
JONAS PLATT, Esq. [at Utica]
Yours sincerely and respectfully,
DE WITT CLINTON.
There’s no doubt that this invitation was known about at Locust Grove quite quickly, as Henry’s family and that of his brother-in-law,
Jonas Platt, stayed in close touch. Daughter Jane had spent the summer of 1822 in Utica, either with the Breeses (her half-sister’s
family) or the Platts (her uncle and aunt). Judge Jonas Platt had long been an important person in the New York political scene. A
Federalist, he had been in the New York Assembly and Senate on and off from 1796 through 1813, and a New York Supreme Court
Justice from 1813 to 1821, losing his place on the bench because of provisions he helped write into the new New York constitution.
And in 1810 he had been his party’s unsuccessful candidate for New York Governor, losing to Daniel D. Tompkins.
DEAR SIR,
Jonas Platt’s Memory of His Role in the Canal Project
Letter from Jonas Platt, Esq. to David Hosack, M.D.
NEW-YORK, May 3, 1828.
It affords me great pleasure to comply with your request, in furnishing some particular facts, within my own knowledge and personal
observation, relating to the origin and progress of the Erie Canal.
The operations during the war of 1756, and particularly the transportation of the army and military stores in two expeditions, the first
under Colonel Bradstreet, and the other under General Prideaux, on the route of the Mohawk and Wood Creek, Oneida Lake and its
outlet, to Lake Ontario, demonstrated the practicability and importance of inland navigation from Schenectady to Oswego. The same
channel of conveyance was in constant use by the fur-traders, from the peace of 1763, till the revolutionary war of 1775. – It was
then also well known, that with slight impediments, there was an easy communication for uthori, from the outlet of Oneida Lake to
the Cayuga and Seneca Lakes. That any person, since that period, should arrogate the merit of discovering or projecting that
channel of inland navigation, is absurd and ridiculous.
The efforts of Christopher Colles, immediately after the peace of 1783, to improve that navigation by means of dams and locks,
were highly commendable. And the subsequent operations of the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company, in following up that
plan of improvement, by canalling around the Little Falls, and in connecting the Mohawk and Wood Creek, by a short canal link of
one mile and a half, were evidence of patriotic zeal for public improvements. But it is a truth which ought not to be disguised, that the
gross errors which were committed by the advocates of that scheme, in their estimates of the expense, and of the profits and
advantages of those improvements, resulted in a complete failure of the benefits promised by its projectors. The whole operations of
the Northern Inland Lock Navigation Company, were condemned and abandoned as utterly useless. Certain I am, that instead of
facilitating, and encouraging subsequent canal operations, the history and experience of the Northern and Western Inland Lock
Navigation Companies, were powerful impediments to the enterprise of the Erie Canal. I shall never forget my embarrassment, in
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