Macedon's Old Lock 60 Makes Canal Engineering Visible

Macedon has a piece of canal engineering you can still picture in stone.

Erie Canalway describes Enlarged Erie Lock 60 as a surviving lock of the Enlarged Erie Canal. It says the lock opened in 1841, was later doubled and lengthened, and was abandoned in 1914 when Lock 30 of the Erie Barge Canal replaced it.

Visitors can walk the old towpath and see the stone chambers where tow ropes wore grooves into limestone. That is a wonderfully physical kind of history. The canal is more than a blue line on a map; in Macedon it is cut stone, worn rock, and the memory of boats moving through an engineered corridor.

Lock 60 turns Macedon’s canal history into a short engineering lesson. The grooves show where tow ropes repeatedly rubbed against the limestone while boats moved through the lock. The boats and tow animals are gone, but their work remains visible in the stone.