Wood Creek was a crucial, fragile link in the main 18th and early 19th century waterway connecting the Atlantic seaboard of North America and its interior beyond the Appalachian Mountains.

[1][2] Philip Lord, Jr., for many years a researcher at the New York State Museum,[3] has published extensively on the Albany-Oswego waterway and on its Wood Creek section.

Thither the bateaux were dragged on sledges and launched onto the dark and tortuous stream, which, fed by a decoction of forest leaves that oozed from the marshy shores, crept in shadow through depths of foliage, with only a belt of illumined sky gleaming between the jagged tree-tops.In the 18th century, boats and their cargoes coming up the Mohawk River had to be moved a few miles overland to Wood Creek at the Oneida Carry (present-day Rome).

Stanwix was the site of an important 1777 battle in the American Revolutionary War, when British, Loyalist and indigenous forces came down from Canada and up Wood Creek to besiege the fort.

[2] Lord and Salisbury have also discovered that a man named Abraham Ogden had used a sophisticated method known as "brushpiling" or a "kid weir" to improve navigation on Wood Creek; they write, "it is in the upper reaches of this tiny stream that we find extraordinary evidence of a direct linkage between American wilderness engineering and English waterway history.

[11] The program of improvements to the Albany-Oswego waterway by the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company had been completed by 1803, which permitted the replacement of the relatively small boats (batteaux) by heavier craft.

Down the canals came furs, lumber, pot and pearl ashes, wheat, and salt, and up them moved boats 'principally laded with European or Indian productions or manufactures'.

[16] In the mid 19th century, John MacGregor wrote of the waterway, "However imperfect the navigation, as compared with that of the Erie Canal, which superseded it, its influence on the prosperity, the early and rapid settlement of western New York, is incalculable.

Nonetheless, thousands of workmen had learned the trades of canal builders, and the de facto engineers of the waterway had acquired experience and vision.

Shaw writes that these men "bent on improving the navigation on the Mohawk at the turn of the century would be intimately involved with the New York canals for the remainder of their lives.

In 1817 New York State chartered the Erie Canal, which would solve the myriad problems of the Albany-Oswego waterway by building a system of unprecedented size and sophistication.