New York State Department of Transportation Division of Waterways Maintenance Regional Waterway Engineer's Correspondence and…

Under the Department of Transportation, there were four regional waterways offices: Albany, Utica, Syracuse, and Rochester. The Utica office was responsible for operations and maintenance of the Erie Barge Canal between Oneida Lake and the eastern portions of Montgomery County. Included in that region were locks, bridges, channel, and the Fonda and Utica section shops. As with all the other regional offices, the monitoring and control of water levels was critical and is reflected in these files. A special characteristic of the Region 2 office was its management of the extensive network of reservoirs in the Adirondacks and in Madison County. Delta and Hinckley Reservoirs date to the early twentieth-century construction of the Barge Canal. Other elements of the network date back to the 1830s.

Frank Jennings was the regional waterways engineer at the time of the transfer of the Waterways office to the New York State Canal Corporation under the New York State Thruway Authority. His correspondence files from the 1970s through the early 1990s form the bulk of the series. His predecessor, Earl Scothon, was also a noted historian of the canal system. He had worked for the department since the 1930s and many of his notes, studies, and correspondence are also in the series.

The Utica office of the Department of Transportation's regional waterways engineer for Region 2 was closed as part of the 1992 transition of the Waterways office to the Canal Corporation. The Utica office files were inherited by the Corporation's Syracuse Division.

This series documents the Division of Waterways Maintenance regional waterways engineer's operation and maintenance of the Erie Barge Canal between Oneida Lake and the eastern portions of Montgomery County. Records document monitoring and control of water levels and management of the network of reservoirs in the Adirondacks and in Madison County. Also included is a master list of all of the files that were removed from the Utica office at the time the office was closed in 1992.

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