How Salt Built Syracuse and Helped Dig the Erie Canal

There’s a reason Syracuse goes by “The Salt City.” Long before the skyscrapers and the university, the swampy shore of Onondaga Lake gave up something the whole young country wanted: salt. Brine bubbled up from springs around the lake, so rich that settlers learned to boil it down or spread it in shallow wooden vats to let the sun do the work. What was left was money.

New York saw the prize early. The state claimed the springs as the Onondaga Salt Springs Reservation and ran them for nearly ninety years, taxing every bushel that left. And here’s the part that ties the knot: that salt duty helped pay to dig the Erie Canal. Engineers like James Geddes and boosters like Joshua Forman were Onondaga men, with one foot in the salt and one in the canal. When the ditch finally opened, Syracuse salt rode it west and east to dinner tables it never could have reached by wagon. The canal both fed on the salt and carried it away.

The two grew up together, salt and canal, leaning on each other for the better part of a century before the springs finally played out and newer salt fields elsewhere took over. But the nickname stuck, the way good ones do.

You can stand right in the middle of that story downtown. The Erie Canal Museum lives in the old Weighlock Building, where canal boats once floated in to be weighed so the tollman could figure what they owed. Portraits of Geddes and Forman hang on the walls, a freighter model sits below, and you can almost hear the brine boiling.