Volunteer boat builders at Canalside’s Longshed Building have been busy working on a replica of the Erie Canal-era Seneca Chief for the past few years, lofting the boat, planing stock, making bronze fasteners in the metal shop and fitting planks.
Using volunteers for such a difficult project seemed like a Herculean task when work began in 2019. But completing the ship’s hull – the most difficult part of the project – is nearly complete, and plans are to launch the boat in May 2024. It’s a prelude to the boat’s starring role in the bicentennial commemoration of the Erie Canal the following year, to commemorate when New York Gov. DeWitt Clinton boarded the boat in Buffalo and traveled to New York City to mark the canal’s opening.
“We have been planking this 73-foot-long boat with amateurs,” said Roger Allen, master boat builder at Buffalo Maritime Center. “This is one of the most astonishing parts of this whole project. They have almost no prior woodworking experience, let alone boat building experience. We are doing the most complicated kind of boat building, and it’s been incredibly successful.”
The work included the added challenge of double planking the hull so it can be stored ashore without worrying about the planks drying out.
On Oct. 7, John Montague turned the last screw to fasten the “whiskey plank” onto the hull, ceremonially completing the wooden boat’s exterior. It was fitting that it was Montague, the Maritime Center’s founder, director emeritus and trustee who long advocated for such a project and took the lead in designing the boat.
“We have a 40-ton object on its way to completion,” Montague said with a sense of amazement. “I look at the whole thing as a kind of a miracle.
“We also achieved what we set out to do: to make this a public project that the community could be involved in at all levels, and see this as a serious piece of Buffalo’s history they can identify with and be proud of,” he added.
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