Скачать или смотреть New York's Maritime History at NYS Fair (August 2014)

Syracuse, NY, August 29, 2014 - You can take a close up walk through New York's maritime history at the Great New York State Fair.

It's a story that dates back to when the Dutch first settled in what is now New York City in the 1600s. Most of our earliest shipwrecks date back to the French and Indian War, during the mid-1700s.

“That’s a period where we can really begin to identify them. You can put dates on them," said Dave White, a NY Sea Grant Recreation specialist.

There's a lot to learn about New York's History through shipwrecks, particularly because those in our fresh water lakes are preserved almost exactly as the day they sank.

“Everyone of them provides a history. Each one of them provides a story of our growth and development," said White.

But it's not always easy to figure out the history of each wreck.

"It’s not like today where there’s name plates and these kinds of things that may still be there," said White. “Just like you would do on land to do an archaeological assessment, with some of these very historical wrecks, you have to do the same thing, only underwater."

There are an estimated 10,000 wrecks at the bottom of New York's lakes and rivers. Most of them went down because of weather or war.

“When you start to think about a lot of the communities we have on the lakes, their history and development is because of their maritime location. If you look at the French and Indian War, if you look at the War of 1812, you look at any one of the skirmishes we’ve had, our ports and harbors were critically important because of water transport and the ability to move troops and the ability to move people. New York really was that hub that everything emerged from," said White.

With the creation of the Erie Canal in the 1880s... the state saw a massive influx of water travel as the economy boomed.

"It was the original thruway people used, whether they were coming through the St. Lawrence River, whether they were coming up the Hudson River and then obviously the Erie Canal opened up the entire country through the connected bodies of water and then into the Mississippi. The growth and development of our country, we can really find and capsulate it in the shipwrecks and the artifacts we find there," said White.

That history is captured in an exhibit at The Great New York State Fair, called “The Great Shipwrecks of New York State’s “Great” Lakes.”

It features 12 of the state's most famous wrecks.

“There’s really three that people talk about when we talk about prime wrecks. We talk about The Ontario which is a significant wreck that went down in Lake Ontario. There’s the Land Tortoise which is in Lake George, which is the oldest in-tact warship in North America. And there’s Benedict Arnold’s gun boat which is on the bottom of Lake Champlain, some of those are accessible to divers. Some are not because they’re in deeper water," said White.

While a lot of history sits below the surface of New York's waterways, to this day, those same lakes and rivers continue to shape our great state and steer the path for our future.

The Shipwrecks exhibit will be at the NYS Fair through Monday, when the fair wraps up.The tent is located in between the Art and Home Center and the State Park at the Fair.

More media coverage via New York Sea Grant's related news item, "On YouTube, On Air: NYSG Makes a Splash at NY State Fair," http://www.seagrant.sunysb.edu/articl....