Chaos Along the Erie Canal

I was working on an informal study guide for A Little History of the United States when I came across one of my favorite stories in Charles Grandison Finney's Memoirs. Finney was a revivalist preacher who traveled along the canal through upstate New York in the mid-nineteenth century. Perhaps his biggest revival campaign took place in Rochester during the autumn and winter of 1830-1831.

    The drawing above, by Gordon Allen, shows the canal a few decades later, where it bends and actually passes over the Genesee River (seen at the left side of the drawing, flowing under the aqueduct arches of the canal). Rochester looked a bit less industrial in 1830, though it was still bursting at the seams. Basil Hall, an English traveler, passed through three years earlier and commented that all was in motion. "The very streets seemed to be starting up of their own accord, ready-made...the lime seemed hardly dry in the masonry of the aqueduct, in the bridges, and in the numberless great saw-mills and manufactories. In many of these buildings the people were at work [at their regular jobs], while at top the carpenters were busy nailing on the planks of the roof...In the centre of the town the spire of a Presbyterian church rose to a great height... I need not say that these half-finished, whole-finished, and embryo streets were crowded with people, carts, stages, cattle, pigs, far beyond the reach of numbers;—and as all these were lifting up their voices together, in keeping with the clatter of hammers, the ringing of axes, and the creaking of machinery, there was a fine concert, I assure you!"

   And it was here that Finney came in 1830 and went to work at First Presbyterian Church:

   There had been a military parade in the city that day. The militia had been called out, and I had feared that the excitement of the parade might divert the attention of the people, and mar the work of the Lord. The house was filled in every part. Dr. Penny had introduced the services and was engaged in the first prayer, when I heard something which I supposed to be the report of a gun, and the jingling of glass, as if a window had been broken. My thought was that some careless person from the military parade on the outside, had fired so near the window as to break a pane of glass. But before I had time to think again, Dr. Penny leaped from the pulpit almost over me, for I was kneeling by the sofa behind him. The pulpit was in front of the church, between the two doors. The rear wall of the church stood upon the brink of the [Erie] canal. The congregation, in a moment, fell into a perfect panic, and rushed for the doors and the windows, as if they were all distracted. One elderly woman held up a window in the rear of the church, where several, as I was informed, leaped out into the canal. The rush was terrific. Some jumped over the galleries into the aisles below; they ran over each other in the aisles.

   I stood up in the pulpit, and not knowing what had happened, put up my hands, and cried at the top of my voice, “Be quiet! Be quiet!” Directly a couple of women rushing up into the pulpit, one on the one side, and the other on the other side, caught hold of me, in a state of distraction. Dr. Penny ran out into the streets, and they were getting out in every direction, as fast as possible. As I did not know that there was any danger, the scene looked so ludicrous to me, that I could scarcely refrain from laughing. They rushed over each other in the aisles, so that in several instances I observed men that had been crushed down, rising up and throwing off others that had rushed upon them. All at length got out. Several were considerably hurt, but no one killed. But the house was strewn with all sorts of women’s apparel. Bonnets, shawls, gloves, handkerchiefs, and parts of dresses, were scattered in every direction. The men had very generally gone out without their hats, I believe; and many persons had been seriously bruised in the awful rush.

   I afterwards learned that the walls of the church had been settling for some time, the ground being very damp from its proximity to the canal. It had been spoken of, in the congregation, as not in a satisfactory state; and some were afraid that either the tower would fall, or the roof, or the walls of the building would come down. Of this I had heard nothing myself. The original alarm was created by a timber from the roof, falling end downwards, and breaking through the ceiling, above the lamp in front of the organ.

   The church didn’t collapse, though its walls did continue to spread, so the revival was moved to the nearby “Brick” church—which, as it happened, was where my family worshiped over a century later when I grew up in Rochester.