Daydream's Great Loop: Third Day on the Erie Canal - Riverlink Park to Riverfront Park, Canajoharie

This blog will chronicle our (Pat and Patty Anderson's)

cruising adventures on the Great Loop!

DAY 77 - June 16, 2017

Daydream and Again at Riverfront Park

We cruised from Riverlink Park in Amsterdam to Riverfront Park in Canajoharie today with our friends Peppe and Bob Christianson and their sailboat Again. Riverlink and Riverfront Park are both great places to tie up the boat!

Riverfront Park is a Canajoharie town park with a floating dock, with power provided by the local Chamber of Commerce. The sign asks boaters to patronize Chamber members' businesses, although the first business listed was a funeral home! I wonder if the irony was lost on the local Chamber! The dock and power are free, which is our favorite price! When we got here, the dock was empty, but it filled up in short order. Other boats that arrived later tied up to the concrete wall around the corner from the floating dock. No power there.

Beechnut Packing Co.

Beechnut Packing Co. Plant

While both places are great to tie up a boat, what a contrast in the two towns! Amsterdam was quite frankly depressed and depressing. Canajoharie is vigorous, although its principal claim to fame, the Beechnut Packing Company, famed for baby food, candy, chewing gum, and a host of other products, is but a fond memory, having gone through mergers and acquisitions that resulted in the company leaving Canajoharie. The original packing plant has quite obviously sat empty for many years. Still, there is a business in almost every storefront on the streets of the town and the lights are on!

Canajoharie was settled in 1730 and incorporated in 1829. The name is from the Mohawk language and means a "pot that washes itself," referring to the Canajoharie "boiling pot," a circular gorge in Canajoharie Creek which is a favorite swimming hole for local residents. One of Canajoharie's 19th Century residents, James Arkell, founded Arkell and Smith in 1859, which produced flat bottomed paper bags (their claim to having "invented" flat bottom paper bags is uncertain, since according to Wikipedia, Margaret Knight was actually the inventor). One of his sons, Bartlett Arkell, was instrumental in founding and was the first president of Beechnut Packing Co. Bartlett also, however, collected art, and donated most of it to the Canajoharie Library and Museum established in the 1920s, today known as the Arkell Library and Museum.

The Arkell Library and Museum owns 21 Winslow Homer paintings, a number of paintings by other American artists including Norman Rockwell and Gilbert Stuart, and a number of copies of European masterpieces that Arkell had collected. This is a worthwhile place to visit in Canajoharie!