Erie Canal Museum

The Erie Canal Museum is the last weighlock in America — the little Greek Revival building in downtown Syracuse where every boat on the canal once stopped to be weighed and tolled. From July 1850, the weighmaster's clerks hoisted each canal boat out of the water in the lock, weighed it, and calculated the toll that paid for the ditch that made New York — $121 million collected against $7 million in construction before the state abolished tolls in 1883.

The building survived by accident and activism — the other six weighlocks (Rochester, Oswego, Waterford, West Troy, Albany, Utica) were all torn down, the canal through Syracuse paved over in the 1920s, and the Weighlock itself nearly lost to the I-81 interchange until the Junior League found the highway drawings and fought the state for it. The canal museum the rescue produced has run it since 1962, the only weighlock left in the country.

The ghosts are the canal's own — the see-through children who play in the courtyard, the woman killed where the model canal boat sits, the arguing men tromping the 1850 halls, the weighmasters still checking the manifests. The file keeps the building's double register: the last remnant of the infrastructure that built New York, and the museum where the canal's drowned and dead are still reportedly working the towpath.

Erie Canal Museum is the archive's weighlock file — the last surviving canal weigh station in America, where the Erie's boats were tolled, the interstate nearly took it, and the canal's dead are said to still walk the halls.