By Dave Warner
You never know what might be pulling into the Little Falls Harbor on any given day. The Tug Erie has been there for two weeks, so if you haven’t had the chance to see one of the tugs that’s been working the Canal for years, head on down to take a look.
On Sunday, the Bobbie G showed up. Reb Manthey was on the boat and stated, “This boat belongs to the Schenectady County Historical Society. It lives at the Mabee Farm, which is at Rotterdam Junction. It’s a replica of a cargo boat from the 1750s. It’s the sort of boat that would be traveling from Albany to Niagra with cargo.”
“Over time, they built bigger and bigger boats as the river improved. By the time this turned into the Erie Canal, they didn’t need these little boats anymore,” she said.
Manthey said that the boat was built by a BOCES class approximately 20 years ago. “As reenactors and rowers, we realize that if you take a thing that is as close to an original as possible and use it in the way that it was originally intended, you can learn an awful lot.”
She said that’s why they’ve been doing “The Big Row” every year. “We spend four days on the water in this cargo boat. Everything we need for that week is in the boat with us. We plan ahead of time that we’re going to stop in these places, but Mother Nature’s actually in charge of that, not us.”
“You might end up in some place that’s very, very strange and meet new and interesting people,” she mentioned.
In this case, they were participating in the reenactment at the Historic Herkimer Home in Little Falls that was held over the weekend for the Revolutionary War encampment. “They loaded soldiers onto the boat, and we moved soldiers around. We do have a tiny little canon that mounts on the front, so we took part in one of their mock battles.”
“The folks at the Herkimer Home were wonderful to us,” she stated.
If you’d like to find out more, their website is thebigrow.com. “We’ve got postings of most of our previous trips. We’re done this trip every year except for 2020, for the past 20 years. If you go back and look at the photos from 20 years ago, you’ll see those are the same people, but much younger, whose clothes were in better condition,” she remarked.
