Queerin’ the Hoggee

by Marko Mikael Marila

This text compliments a site-specific installation in the “An/Aesthetics” group exhibit curated by Michael Asbill, Jeff Benjamin, Lital Dotan, Maria Elena Ferrer-Harrington and Emilie Houssart, and displayed at the Snyder Estate (Century House Historical Society) in Rosendale, NY, between August 2022 and October 2023.

In the early 1800s, before the expansion of the railroad network, water canals were crucial for the safe transportation of building material from the American Northeast to the area’s booming centers, such as New York City. One of these waterways was the Delaware and Hudson Canal, opened in 1828, which came to serve as a route for the transportation of coal and wood to and cement from Snyder Cement Works in Rosendale, NY, or what is today known as the Widow Jane Mine.

The vessels used on the canal were not self-propelled, but instead pulled by horses and mules from a towpath that ran along the side of the canal. In the early years of the canal, the boats were relatively small – capable of carrying a 30-tonne load – and towable by one horse. As the canal was widened and deepened with its intensifying use, the barges got bigger – they could now be loaded with as much as 136 tonnes of material – and required two or three mules to pull.

In addition to the animal workforce, a special human profession developed on the canal. It was the job of the hoggee (also hoggy), the towpath driver, to walk sometimes 20 miles a day with the animals, tend them, and pump out the barges. The monthly pay of the hoggee was $3 (Osterberg 2002, 72), less than $100 in purchasing power today.

Especially in the early days of canal operations, the hoggees were mostly young children, many of them orphans. Work on the canal was hard and dangerous. Shallow as it may have been, falling in the water, getting tangled in the ropes and drowning was a real threat. Those who survived the hardships had to look elsewhere for work when the canal froze up in the winter. The profession was also extremely disrespected, and the hoggees had to tolerate the taunts or shouts of passers-by (Wyld 1962, 83):

Hoggee on the towpath

Five cents a day

Picking up horseballs

To eat along the way

As the railroad network improved, the transport of goods on the canal waned towards the end of the 1800s. The canal was drained for the most parts after the 1898 season, and finally abandoned completely in 1904. In the final years, only the northernmost stretch was in use, as cement was still being transported from Rosendale to Kingston on the Hudson.

Although originally built for the purpose of transporting raw materials, the canal also saw other uses. In the years of operation, the canal company frowned upon the canal’s recreational use, but it quickly became a popular tourist destination, attracting visitors from afar to marvel at the scenic areas, to experience the canal from a rowboat, or skate on its frozen surface. Today the remaining stretches of the Delaware and Hudson Canal are historic sites that serve a purely recreational and educational purpose, much like the Widow Jane Mine. Through the process of heritagization, the sites have become locations for aesthetic regeneration, a phenomenological register that stands in stark contrast to the anaesthetic effects of working in the Rosendale cement mines or on the Delaware and Hudson Canal.

Inspired by my lifelong history in working with horses, especially through the philosophy of natural horsemanship, Queerin’ the Hoggee draws attention to the complicated human-horse relationship in the industrial past. Forced to work long hours on the towpath – but also in the mines – the horse/mule-human hybrid became vital not only for the functionings of the canal transportation network, but also for the whole “riparian co-ontology” of the waterways, the amorphous intermingling of the multitude of different solid and liquid modes of existence that gave emergence to a complete industry, but which also continues to exist as an ecology in itself (Benjamin 2022). It is precisely via and along waterways that different parts of the Northeast were first reached by industrial societies, then transformed through the practices of quarrying, and finally transported elsewhere in refined form.

References

Benjamin, J. 2022. All Inhibitory Is Dream: An Archaeology of Anaesthesia. Doctoral dissertation. Columbia University, NY.

Osterberg, M.M. 2002. The Delaware & Hudson Canal and the Gravity Railroad. Arcadia.

Wyld, L.D. 1962. Low Bridge! Folklore and the Erie Canal. Syracuse University Press.