Hidden in the names of Ohio canal towns and their festivals, history has a way of creeping into the consciousness during the summertime.

    That's when folks in Coshocton break out dulcimers and croon songs penned by old canal captains.

    And when Baltimore historian Jim Reed dons a straw hat, stands on the mossy stones of Bibler Lock and relates tales of hard-drinking and hard-living boat hands.

    And when Andy Hite relives a dormant chapter of Ohio history.

    Throughout the warm months, the replica canalboat retraces the strip of canal. Hite, site manager for the Piqua Historical Area, watches as visitors leave to climb into SUVs and shuddering buses.

    Then mules Jack and Jim pull the slack from the towline, easing the boat from the shore. On the trip to the storage dock, and in the absence of chattering passengers, the canal waters begin to speak.

    As a current caresses the belly of the vessel, the resulting gurgle -- gentle as a baby's laugh -- issues from below like a call from the past.

    Hite balances on the boat's roof, gazing at concentric circles made as the bow slices reflections of sycamores. The setting can be eerily quiet.

    "If I'm driving the mules or steering the boat and I'm by myself, I think: 'Who all's passed through here? And what were their aspirations when they did? What were they looking for?' "

    If the ghosts that roam Hite's bit of canal could talk, they'd tell of pioneer ambition, high political stakes, necessary death, drunken brawls and whorehouses. They'd speak of a lost lifestyle in which babies were born on line boats and honeymooners traveled luxury packets.

    The tales recall lives infinitely more simple -- and, therefore, immeasurably more difficult.

    Today, Ohio canals exist only in remnants: scattered locks and occasional grooves where broad passageways formerly lay. Yet in the mid-1800s, canals cut across 1,000 miles of Ohio landscape, changing the face of the rugged frontier.

    Before the state passed legislation to build canals in 1825, Cleveland -- still spelled Cleaveland -- was a collection of log cabins; Akron didn't exist. Ohioans traveled by foot or on wagon trails mired in mud. A trip from Columbus to Lake Erie took weeks.

    "Ohio was in trouble," says Mary Ellen Given, director of marketing at Roscoe Village, a restored town on the Ohio and Erie Canal in Coshocton. "People were packing up -- going home. They couldn't sell their goods because they couldn't get them to market at a reasonable price."

    The federal government refused to finance Ohio canals. State legislators built them anyway, selling bonds to pay the bill.

    "Commissioners (appointed to oversee the project) paid out of their own pockets and then hoped the state would pay them back," says Norman Brown, a volunteer who leads tours in Piqua. "In many cases, it hurt their own businesses, their own finances."

    In July 1825, laborers began hacking twin channels through the wilderness -- the Miami and Erie Canal in the west and the Ohio and Erie Canal in the east. At a ceremony in swampland near Newark, black flies gnawed at horses, whose snorting drowned out speeches by dignitaries.

    The scene was a taste of hardship to come.

    Many farmers won contracts to build half-mile sections near their property, but many underestimated costs and went bankrupt.

    "You had sections completed next to sections not," Brown says. "It was a constant problem of money; there just wasn't enough money to give."

    The work was dirty and grueling. Irish and German immigrants -- many of whom had trenched New York's Erie Canal -- dug for 30 cents a day and jiggers of whiskey.

    Knee-deep in muck, the workers carved 40-foot-wide channels one shovelful at a time.

    "If the shovel broke, the (jagged) end would just get (them) in the stomach," Brown says.

    Clearing rock with black powder was dangerous and inexact. Laborers trying to cut a towpath from the face at Black Hand Gorge in Licking County blasted the famous formation to bits. Similar accidents claimed dozens of lives.

    Even deadlier, though, was the "canal fever" that lurked in the camps where workers slept.

    Millersport historian Ted Keller -- stepping through tombstones, blackened and buckled like old beggars' teeth -- looks over a 15-foot ledge into the Ohio and Erie, which wraps around the town cemetery like a giant "C."

    "The sanitary conditions weren't necessarily the best in the world," he says.

    Cholera, typhoid, smallpox and malaria took their toll.

    The Deep Cut section near Millersport -- the final phase of the Ohio and Erie -- claimed more lives, money and resolve than any other section. The almost 2-mile stretch had to be lowered as much as 30 feet, to the level of the reservoir to the north.

    Immigrants shoveled the hellish landscape for five years, until the Deep Cut was completed in 1831. Many ended up in the potter's field that became Millersport Cemetery.

    Throughout the state, a third of canal workers -- roughly 1,000 -- perished.

    "Wading in the muck, you get pneumonia easily," says Barnett Golding, a former officer of the Canal Society of Ohio, a nonprofit group that promotes the canal heritage.

    "They just buried them along the way. No way to get them back to the next of kin. So they just put you in the embankment."

    At great price, the frontier had been broken.

    By 1850, hundreds of boats loaded with grain, salt pork and whiskey traveled the canals.

    In a half-mile descent from Lockington, on the Miami and Erie north of Piqua, six locks spill down a green hillside like dominoes tipped from a box.

    Andy Hite ambles across 500-pound slabs of limestone without minding the cavity into which he could tumble.

    "A boat crew could technically navigate a lock in 15 minutes," he says. "With six locks, it wouldn't be inconceivable that you could spend a day in Lockington."

    Businesses sprang up to meet the demands of canal users.

    Several yards from Lock 1, a tidy brick house belies a licentious past. The Red Garter Inn, one historian explains with a wink, sold more than whiskey and lunch.

    Warehouses, mills, dry-goods stores and boat makers soon lined the waterways.

    Namesake towns emerged: Canal Fulton, Canal Winchester, Groveport, Lockington, Lockville, Lockbourne, Millersport.

    Akron, plotted on the Ohio and Erie, burgeoned.

    Cincinnati, Cleveland and Columbus boomed with trade.

    That legacy survives.

    Today, the culture of canals exists only in faded sepia photographs and in lyrics of canal songs.

    Still, almost every Ohio canal town has a resident historian who brings the canals back to life.

    Standing on the lip of a lock with Hite -- or Baltimore's Jim Reed or Millersport's Ted Keller -- one can almost hear the fights among boat hands trying to make it first through the locks, or the crack of blacksnake whips as barefoot boys drove mule teams.

    The speed at which canal boats traveled -- 4 mph -- wasn't a lot.

    "But put into the context of 1840 -- it was the speed the world moved at," Hite says. "This was great travel. You could walk to Cincinnati. But when you can ride . . ."

This article was published August 8, 2004, in the Columbus Dispatch.

Copyright Columbus Dispatch.

WATERWAYS THROUGH TIME

Towns celebrate canals’ vital role in Ohio’s growth

CHAMPIONS OF THE CANALS

Enthusiasts struggle to preserve remnants of system

The grassy knoll on the west side of New Bremen's Lock 1 North offers no hint of the tumbledown shack that once hugged the banks of the Miami and Erie Canal.

    But when Delores Stienecker stands where the gates swung wide to usher in canalboats, she still sees the historic lock-tender's house.

    And she still feels the sting of remorse.

    "I tried to buy the house," she recalls. "I tried to buy the walnut siding. . . . (The town) said, 'No, the firemen need the practice.' "

    So when the house was torched on an autumn day in 1964, Stienecker fled.

    "I went to a friend's house, sat by her pond and pouted," she says.

    Evidence of Ohio's canal system, which spread 1,000 miles from the 1840s until the early 1900s, is slowly disappearing from the landscape.

    Trees crowd the floors of channels that once stretched 40 feet wide. A number of stone locks -- used to raise and lower the boats along the waterway -- are buckled and crumbling. Cities whose economies were weaned on canal trade have bulldozed and blacktopped the system's remains.

    Even so, Ohio has more canal remnants -- and more enthusiasts such as Stienecker fighting to preserve them -- than many other states.

    New York, which started a craze when it opened the Erie Canal in 1825, rechanneled and rerouted it so many times that much of the original is buried beneath sludge, trees and development.

    Like open tombs, the 100 or so stone locks that remain in Ohio -- about a third of the original number -- invite visitors to peer in and ponder other days and other lives.

    Jim Reed kneels at the edge of one, Baltimore's Bibler Lock, scraping away a film of moss to reveal decades-old graffiti on the sandstone slabs.

    "It would have been a shame to have kept this hidden," he says. "You can talk about this, but until you actually see it, it doesn't come to life."

    Six years ago, Reed decided that his eighth-grade history students at Liberty Union Middle School needed some field study about local heritage. Of the town's eight locks, only two remained intact; the one near the old Bibler Farm was on public property.

    In midwinter, he ventured to the spot and found it enshrouded in trees and brush.

    "Nature had reclaimed this lock," he says. "Most people in town didn't know where it was. You could have been within 20 yards of it and not have been able to see it."

    He started his own reclamation -- with a machete and hand ax -- on weekends and after school.

    Several months later, he turned the work over to the village, which built a path and mows the surrounding area.

    To suggest that he saved Bibler Lock is a stretch, Reed says.

    "It was going to be here regardless. I just exposed it so that people could see what a gem we have right here in our own community."

    Getting the word out about canal history -- "fertilizing it," he says -- does much to preserve it.

    During Baltimore's summer festival -- scheduled this year from Wednesday through Saturday -- Reed leads residents to the canal edge and regales them.

    In one breath, he tells how James Garfield -- then a tow boy -- jumped a 15-foot lock to chase down a lazy lock tender; and, in the next, explains the hydraulics of the lock system.

    Discussing a phenomenon he calls "canal rage," he tells how a fistfight often determined which boat passed through the lock first.

    People today, he surmises, aren't so different from their counterparts in the 1800s.

    "Today we call it road rage. These guys had to get to places just as quickly as a truck driver does today. There was always a constant pressure to move commerce on the canal."

    Society's need for speed, experts say, eventually led to the death of Ohio canals.

    Barnett Golding is a general among the vanguard that has fought for years to preserve the canal system.

    While touring the Columbus Feeder Canal, the 20-year officer for the Canal Society of Ohio, a group that seeks to preserve the state's canal heritage, tries to explain the demise of a transportation system whose only fuel was the grass fed to mules.

    "Railways used a lot more fuel and energy, even to make the equipment: all the coal it takes to get a train up the tracks, compared to hay. But the rails were as good as a water course and a lot faster."

    Whizzing along Rt. 23 at 60 mph, Golding stops his discourse occasionally to point out dips and grooves in the landscape -- the only remains of the 11-mile feeder canal that ran from Columbus to Lockbourne.

    "They couldn't come directly to Columbus with the canal," Golding says, "even though (a single waterway connecting) Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati was their original goal."

    The capital had to be connected to the Ohio and Erie by a navigable feeder, which fed the main line with water from the Scioto River.

    Canal ditches laced with power lines now parallel Rt. 23 south of Columbus.

    Near the outskirts of town, quarries, warehouses and office parks crowd the landscape. Still, Golding is able to locate the canal behind a body shop.

    Several years have passed since he last guided tours of the feeder.

    At the Whittier Street bridge, he stops, aghast.

    "Boy, boy, boy. This is all new, from Greenlawn over," he says. "I'm more shocked than I thought I'd be. I can't get my bearings."

    He gets out of the car below the bridge to walk the railroad tracks, looking for a hint of what used to be -- a ridge or a familiar building.

    "There isn't a single landmark," Golding remarks dolefully. "I would have been down here months and months ago had I known there was all this destruction."

    One man's destruction is another's progress, though.

    Beyond the tracks, at the edge of the flourishing Brewery District, a backhoe repositions mounds of black earth in an area that Golding thinks was a towpath.

    At Bicentennial Park, the fragments of memory coalesce when Golding spots an electric substation between the Waterford Tower and Miranova condominiums.

    "There," he says, sounding relieved. "The canal came through (to the waterfront) right where that building sits."

    A plaque overlooking the river tells a Cliffs Notes version of a network that vanished from Columbus in 1904. By then, railroads had crisscrossed the state for decades. After a flood damaged the Ohio and Erie, the system went defunct.

    Canals were drained, filled in and, in many places, covered with more railroad tracks.

    Progress is indiscriminate and -- for some, including Golding -- painful.

    "It could have been some use if it had still been around -- a tourist area, a hiking corridor," he says. "But it's done."

    Across the river, and all around, the wheels of commerce whir and buzz.

    Canal buffs such as Golding know that the canals had something to do with that. If only in that sense, Ohio's silver-ribbon highway endures.

This article was published August 8, 2004, in the Columbus Dispatch.

Copyright Columbus Dispatch.