The Forestport Breaks: A Nineteenth-Century Conspiracy along the Black River Canal - Hardcover

Doyle, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0815607725 ISBN 13: 9780815607724

Publisher: Syracuse University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Doyle begins with a family mystery (the precise location of a grave) and ends with a reconstruction of what one New York lawman called the most damnable conspiracy ever hatched in the state. It concerned the struggling upstate logging town of Forestport and a series of breaks in the levees on the Erie Canal that flooded towpaths, farmland, and businesses. Well-connected contractors knew they could clean up repairing the breaks. Was the damage to the levees accidental? Doyle, a journalist for the McClatchy newspapers, deploys fly-on-the-wall conversations and no-nonsense foreshadowing to tell the century-old story as if it were a classic Western or a Greek tragedy. The work is salted with contemporary b&w photographs. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

About this title

About the Author

<b>Michael Doyle</b> is a reporter in Washington, DC, for E&amp;E News, covering environmental issues. He formerly reported on the Supreme Court and California for the Washington bureau of the McClatchy newspapers. He has won awards for his reporting from the National Press Club and the Washington Press Club Foundation, among others. Doyle is the author of <i>Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback </i><i>Revolution an</i>d <i>The Ministers’ War: John W. Mears, the Oneida Community, and the Crusade for Public Morality. </i>

Reviews

Carefully researched and nimbly written, Doyle's account of a 19th-century conspiracy to sabotage part of the Erie Canal system is a delight to read. Completed in 1825, the Erie Canal was an engineering marvel that vastly improved commercial transportation. In 1856, canal boats carried over four million tons of goods-more that twice the load of the railroads. But by 1869, the tide had turned in favor of New York's railroads; the canal had fallen into disrepair and was subject to costly breaks that flooded the countryside. In 1895, New York voters approved $9 million in improvements-but a subsequent investigation revealed that all but $25,000 of the money had been spent, but only one third of the work was complete. The subsequent scandal made heads roll, including the governor's. After Theodore Roosevelt was elected in 1898, he appointed Colonel John N. Partridge as superintendent of public works. Aware that Forestport in Oneida County (which was along the Black River feeder canal) had acquired an unsavory reputation, Partridge hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to investigate. The locals fought the Pinkertons as enemies of the working man, but the latter eventually uncovered a plot that involved nearly every family in Forestport (and, in the words of one prosecutor, had "no parallel in viciousness") in which the canal was "the plaything of the politically connected" while the working men assigned to protect it damaged it for a tiny slice of the pie. In the end, 13 men went to jail for sabotaging the canal in an effort to rob the state treasury. History and mystery fans should enjoy this well told tale.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0815607725
• ISBN 13: 9780815607724
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256