In going though old collections of photos I discovered an album of several hundred old postcards. The ones shown in the slideshow were all printed in Germany because they had developed the color printing process. I selected the cards for the gallery that were collected before 1900 by my great grandfather Captain Sam Neff all of the cards werefrom Oswego NY.
Oswego NY is a port on Lake Ontario that has a canal that connects to the Erie Canal. I think it is likely that Sam took the canal because he may have visited relatives in New Lisbon, NY where he was born. His family moved from NY to WI when he was 9 years old.