The words “Erie Canal” often brings to mind those engineering marvels we call “locks” that raise and lower boats along the historic waterway. However, the portion of the Erie Canal that runs through the Town of Greece is part of a 60-mile “long level” between the cities of Rochester and Lockport that has no locks. That wasn’t always the case. For a few brief years in the early part of the 20th century, the town of Greece had a functioning lock known as “Junction Lock.”

Over its two centuries of existence, the waterway we know as the Erie Canal underwent two enlargements. The original Erie Canal, sometimes known as “Clinton’s Ditch” after canal supporter and New York Governor DeWitt Clinton, was completed in 1825. The canal prism or trough was 40 feet wide and four feet deep. Because of the success of the original Erie Canal, it was widened and straightened between 1836 and 1862. The Enlarged Erie Canal was 70 feet across and seven feet deep and remained mostly in the same location as the original. The canal was enlarged again in the early part of the 20th century to allow larger, self-propelled vessels. Construction began in 1905 and was completed in 1918. The waterway was rerouted around major cities such as Rochester and Syracuse and renamed the Barge Canal. In our area, it measured 120 feet wide and 12 feet deep.

In 1917, Barge Canal engineers realized that the canal harbor facilities along the Genesee River, south of the Court Street Dam, would not be ready for the opening on May 15, 1918. A Junction Lock, located in South Greece, between Long Pond and Elmgrove Roads, was quickly constructed to allow the smaller canal boats to continue to use the Enlarged Erie Canal to the old Rochester harbor. They would then cross the Genesee River in downtown on the old Erie Canal Aqueduct (today the Broad Street Bridge) and rejoin the new Barge Canal outside of the city in Greece.

Because the water level of the new Barge Canal was three feet higher than the level of the Enlarged Erie Canal, a lock was constructed in South Greece at the “junction” of the old and new canals to allow the smaller canal vessels to travel between the two levels. The lock was 300 feet long with stone block walls; concrete abutments were constructed at each end to hold wooden gates. A wooden walkway was built between them to secure the boats while locking through. The Greece Junction Lock operated for about five years, until 1923. Once the new Rochester harbor was completed, the old canal section was abandoned. Throughout the later part of the 1920s, Junction Lock was used as a dry dock, for building and repairing boats, until it was finally blocked off.

Today historic markers and simulated lock gates mark the entrance to the Junction Lock area off the Erie Canalway Trail. In 2009, the town of Greece received a $43,200 grant from the NYS Office of Parks and Historic Preservation as part of the federal Recreational Trails Program to fund a new trail to the Junction Lock. The trail, which opened in 2010, begins in a small trailhead parking area on Ridgeway Avenue, just west of the Unity at Ridgeway office building and about one mile east of Henpeck Park. The stone lock chamber and a portion of the original Enlarged Erie Canal bed are visible as hikers and bikers travel the former towpath of the 1862 Enlarged Erie Canal. The trail to Junction Lock was part of the town and business community’s efforts to raise awareness of Greece’s presence on the Erie Canal which began in the 1820s and continues today, more than two centuries later.