Before dawn on August 2, 1826, Alexander Stewart Scott stepped aboard the steamboat Chambly in Quebec City, Canada. He was on vacation from his studies at law school and was on his way to visit family in western New York. Fortunately for us, he kept a diary of his trip. 

Traveling by steamboat, stage, canal packet, and wagon, his journey took him, via land and water, along a route defined by Lake Champlain, Lake George, and the Erie Canal. 

Scott was 21 years old; the Erie Canal was not yet one year old. (In operation in parts since 1819, it was not officially “opened” until October 26, 1825.)  

He sampled the waters at Saratoga Springs, about which, on August 16, he wrote: “they may be of ‘The Waters of life’ but they have a most villainous taste, extremely saline, and strongly impregnated, as I am told with Carbonic acid – the Village itself is a very handsome place …” 

Walking around Albany on September 25, he visited the New York State Library, which was housed in the Capitol. Of the library he wrote that it had “a small, but as far as I am able to judge a very choice collection of Books.” 

In his second-to-last journal entry, on Saturday, November 18, as he traveled by steamboat on the last leg of his journey, he obviously was bored and so he wrote: 

“…a long passage this; and which is rendered the more dull by the want of Books or something else to help one to kill time; a small Library is a very desirable thing on board of these public Packets, in this respect we are far inferior to the Americans, who … even in their Canal Boats have generally got a pretty good collection of works of different natures for the use of the Passengers – for the reading of which they are commonly charged at the rate of a cent a volume, and often nothing at all …” 

The cherry on the top of this sundae of a book is the expense account of his trip, which lists the places he visited, how many miles it was between his starting point and his destination, his method of transportation, and how much it cost to travel two hundred years ago. 

Scott’s hand-written diary can be viewed as part of the New York State Library’s Digital Collections.  

For teachers: An annotated transcript – with drawings and maps from other New York State Library collections – was published in 2019: Schneider, Paul G., Jr. Everything Worthy of Observation: The 1826 New York State Travel Journal of Alexander Stewart Scott (Albany, N.Y. : SUNY Press/Excelsior Editions)