when canals ran through it

Ohio’s canal system revolutionized transportation in frontier Ohio and created wealth in the process

Story by Chris Cumo

Photos by Rick Buchanan

On a quiet farm in Erie County, ducks and bald eagles call home a swath of wetland that cuts through Mike Gastier’s land. Now a wildlife sanctuary and bicycle trail, the wetland was once a section of the Milan Canal, linking Milan, via the Huron River, with Lake Erie. Today most of the canal is gone. Silt covers parts of it and a railroad company filled in other spots to level the ground. The wooden locks have rotted away and grass and other plants have reclaimed the land.

Yet even the most derelict parts of the canal have not lost all traces of the towpath that runs beside it. More than a century ago, horses toiled along the towpath, tugging canal boats laden with grain to Lake Erie, then east through the Erie Canal to New York City. The Milan Canal was part of an engineering and agricultural tour de force: nearly 1,000 miles of canals stretched across 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties, according to information from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and the American Canal Society. Some of the canals such as the one in Milan, carried the harvest east; others went south to the Ohio River or its tributaries, where steamers took Ohio’s bounty as far south as New Orleans. The Miami and Erie Canal connected the Ohio River and Lake Erie with 250 miles of waterways, opening markets both east and south.

“Before the canals, farmers really didn’t have a way to get grain to market,” said Wilma Hunt, a historian at Roscoe Village in Coshocton. Farmers made do with a patchwork of roads. The round trip between Newark and Milan took a week by wagon, estimates local historian John Schaffer, a member of the Erie County Historical Society. Corn growers had the unenviable choice of distilling their corn into whiskey andshipping it by wagon or feeding it to hogs and walking them to market if they could not butcher and salt them on the spot, Schaffer said. The 90-mile trek between Greenville and Cincinnati, Ohio’s center for pork processing, was arduous for both hog and farmhand.

The canals solved the problem of distance, linking farmer and market by water. The result was an agricultural renaissance. Before completion of the Milan Canal in 1839, the town could not claim distinction (Thomas Edison would not be born until 1847), but the next decade it became Ohio’s leading wheat exporter and second in the world to Odessa, Russia, Schaffer said. In 1840, Roscoe, a town along the Ohio and Erie Canal (in Coshocton County), was the fourth leading wheat exporter in Ohio, according to Hunt. Wheat that had fetched 25 cents a bushel before the canal commanded as much as $1.25 per bushel during the 1840s, estimated Terry Woods, past president of both the American Canal Society and the Canal Society of Ohio.

The meteoric rise in the value of wheat confirmed eastern Ohio as what agricultural historian Robert Leslie Jones has called the “Backbone Counties,” with wheat being the backbone of the economy. By contrast, western Ohio became the land of corn and hogs as the canals along the Ohio River extended north, making it possible to raise hogs and the corn to feed them, ever further north of Cincinnati. Thanks to the canals, the Queen City became “Porkopolis,” America’s capital of pork processing.

Today’s canal remnants
Robert Ewing, whose farm in Pike County overlooks a two-mile stretch of the Ohio and Erie Canal, does not think in terms of real estate prices. Instead, he remembers playing by the canal as a child. Like Gastier, Ewing appreciates the canal’s nostalgic quality and remains in awe of it as a monument to ingenuity and technological skill. “It’s a remarkable engineering feat,” he said.

Woods agrees, taking a long view of the canals. He traces the roots of canal building deep into the soil of antiquity. “The canal is an ancient technology,” he said. “The Chinese and Egyptians built canals.” So did the Aztecs and Maya.

Whether in the ancient world or in 19th century Ohio, canals were expensive to build. The Ohio and Erie Canal alone cost $5 million to dig, Woods estimates. Adjusted for inflation, the cost today would be roughly $80 million. It was money well spent, according to Woods, who regards the canals as an investment in economic development. “We had to have it,” he said of the canal system. The state of Ohio, which financed much of the construction of the canals, justified the expense by pointing to the success of the Erie Canal in New York, the predecessor of the Ohio and Erie Canal.

The majestic sweep of the canals from the Ohio River to Lake Erie is enough to enthrall anyone, but there is also grandeur in the fragments of the canals that have withstood the ravages of time and that now remind Ohioans of the heyday of water transport.

Time and erosion have emptied sections of the canal but other parts still hold water. So pervasive has been the canal’s influence in Pike County that Ewing can tell at a glance the age of a house: older homes face the canal and newer ones the highway. “When you see something like a canal every day you tend to take it for granted,” said Ewing . “But it’s really a neat landmark.”

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