By Terry K Woods
There have been a number of statements over the years in the press and media about the “end” of the Ohio Canal. Through traffic ran on it, these statements say, until 1913 when the flood destroyed the canal and the State abandoned it. Well, there are true statements in that and some, eh, not so true. I set about writing a column to set the record straight. I’m not at all sure I have done that.
My first effort was to use two newspaper articles about the last days of the canal in their entirety and correct the wrong parts. Well, that didn’t work well at all. Then I decided to use an excerpt from the Board of Public Works Report for 1911 describing how the canal was in bad shape. But I couldn’t find one of the two statements from that report I wanted to use verbatim.
I knew, however, that I had quoted that bit in my 2008 GRAND CANAL, so I went to it, and sort of changed my mind, again, about the column. Today’s final column will be a slightly rewritten and shortened version of pages 64 to 71 of my GRAND CANAL.
It is basically about the results of the State pulling the plug on the early 1900s rebuild of the northern division of the Ohio Canal and then nature taking a hand in the final decision of keeping the canal open with her devastating 1913 Flood.
I hope you find today’s column informative and, at least a bit, interesting. It is a long one, and, “Yes Mary, no pictures.” And if you have read my book, this is all old news. Still, I think, in order to understand the history of Ohio’s Canal Era completely, it is important to look closely at that period between the ending of the 1909 construction season and the Spring of 1913.
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LAST DAYS OF THE OHIO CANAL
From the end of the 1909 construction season until the devastating March 1913 flood, the Ohio Canal lay, with its attempted northern rebuid stalled, manymiles from the coal fields of Tuscarawas County. Charles E. Perkins’s ninth consecutive term as Chief Engineer of Ohio’s Public Works expired in May of 1910. He was not reappointed; nor was he immediately replaced. There was no Chief Engineer’s Report to the State Legislature for 1910, and for over a year the Ohio Canal existed in a state of limbo.
Finally on July 3rd, 1911 John I. Miller was appointed to the position of Chief Engineer. In his annual report to the State Legislature presented on November 11, 1911, he stated that, “the canals of Ohio are in such a state of physical disability as to make it possible for navigation only in a very few instances.”
During the enforced hiatus of long distance canal traffic during the attempted rebuild, the few mills, mines, and industries that had regularly shipped and received by canal either shifted their business elsewhere or were forced out of business. The boatmen too, drifted away and into other jobs and lives. Only those few boats that had been dragged up on shore or sunk for the duration into the convenient basins and widewaters that still survived.
Mixed signals came from the Legislature and Board of Public Works regarding the future of the Ohio Canal. Major physical flood damages in the northern division during the fall of 1911 were rebuilt in 1912. However, the spoil from dredging the canal south of Clinton in the last days of the rebuild had been left in heaps. The towpath south of Clinton into Canal Fulton was not plowed smooth and leveled until 1912. Also, it appears that portions of the canal through Stark County to the Zoar Feeder in Tuscarawas County was never refilled with water after the rebuild and relocation of New lock 5-A and the new Cemetery Run Culvert south of Massillon in 1909.
Meanwhile, the State Legislature busied itself disposing of the lower portion of the Ohio Canal. Most of the canal line between the Dresden Sidecut in Muskingum County and Portsmouth was officially abandoned in 1911. Only that section between the Licking Summit Reservoir and a few industries in Newark remained and that was only for hydraulic power.
The remainder of the Ohio Canal was allowed to ‘just exist’. Then, on December, 31, 1912 the State Legislature abolished the Board of Public Works and replaced it with a one-man “Supervisor of Public Works”. But since John Miller was appointed to that position, perhaps the State Legislature wasn’t entirely ready to give up on its canal system. As it turned out, that question was soon taken out of the Legislature’s hands.
The snows were heavy in northern Ohio in January and February, 1913.(1) Then a rare thaw occurred in mid-March, and on March 23, Easter Sunday, it began to rain. A heavy downpour continued all over the State. By the wee hours of Tuesday morning the creeks and rivers throughout Ohio were at a high flood stage. Though western Ohio was hardest hit the rivers in eastern Ohio, including the Cuyahoga, Tuscarawas, Muskingum, Licking and Scioto, – rivers whose valleys carried the channel of the Ohio Canal – all were at a record flood stage.
Rain had begun falling in northeastern Ohio around noon on Easter. More than eight inches fell during the next four days. Families in the river valleys were forced to leave their homes. Cities in those valleys were without power, shelter, food, and water. Firemen and police found it difficult to reach any emergency.
The Tuscarawas River bottom including the canal near Clinton and Warrick, were covered by water for a width of 12 miles. All that water had to be funneled through a valley that contained Canal Fulton, Massillon, and Navarre. The Tuscarawas River overflowed its banks at Canal Fulton and, together with the canal, raced through town, destroying much within its path.
Easter Sunday had seen the residents of Massillon going to special musical services through a diving rain. It continued all day and night and again through Monday. At 8:45 Tuesday morning the Tuscarawas River passed the previous high-water mark set in 1904 and continued rising at the rate of two feet per hour. Only the roofs of homes along the canal were above water.
At 11:00 am that day the only two schools in Massillon that had managed to open were closed. The raging Tuscarawas waters, reaching halfway up the sides of a house on Tremont, battered and pushed until the house rose from its foundation and floated off only to crash against a railroad trestle and disintegrate.
The rising waters covered the Ohio Drilling Company, the Massillon Foundry, and Shuster Brewery to a depth of three to four feet. A portion of the Sippo Creek Culvert under South Erie Street collapsed and the creek flooded the main business section of Massillon.
The three villages that made up Navarre were on higher ground and didn’t suffer as greatly as Canal Fulton or Massillon, but the canal through Navarre was utterly destroyed. Every bridge across the Tuscarawas in Stark County except one in Navarre was swept away.
Floodwaters in Bolivar exceeded the previous record by four feet, though damage to the actual town was minimized as much of the town had been built upon higher ground.
The Sad Iron Works, a plant of the Dover Manufacturing Company, and the Wagner Brothers Machine Shop, all located along the canal’s towpath just below the Factory Street Bridge in Canal Dover, collapsed due to flood waters. Every bridge across the Tuscarawas and Muskingum Rivers in Tuscarawas, Coshocton and Muskingum Counties was destroyed by the rapidly flowing flood waters which undermined the abutments.
Residents in Lockport, on the southeast side of New Philadelphia at Lock 13 were completely cut off from the surrounding countryside for days. Provisions had to be boated in. The residents of Port Washington and Newcomerstown were also isolated for several days and the canal channel through those towns was nearly obliterated.
In Coshocton, floodwaters spread across 30 city blocks – 8 feet deep in some areas. In Zanesville, near the head of the main Muskingum Improvement, the river crested at 51.8 feet, the highest stage ever recorded up to that time, putting nearly 3,500 buildings under water.
The northern part of the canal above the Portage Summit wasn’t hit quite as hard as other areas, but its citizens reacted more violently. Over the years, a number of fine homes and vacation sites had sprung up along the shores of the Portage Lakes Canal Reservoir. Nervous home and land owners demanded that floodwaters be sent down the canal, away from their properties. Somehow, the banks of the reservoir were breached, sending thousands of tons of water cascading down the Tuscarawas and Muskingum Valleys.
Rumors quickly began circulating that Summit County residents, fearing for the safety of their homes and property, had dynamited the reservoir embankments to relieve local flooding. The Massillon City Council later investigated the alleged dynamiting of the Cottage Grove Dam near Paddy Ryan’s Inn on a feeder from Turkeyfoot Lake to the canal and river. Summit County Officials denied that there was any dynamiting of dams or retaining embankments to save Portage Lakes property. The blame was placed upon excessive pressure of floodwaters on the earthen embankments of the Reservoir.
Whatever the cause, the embankment was breached around Midnight on Sunday. The level of Turkeyfoot Lake dropped some six feet quickly, with a subsequent rise in the Tuscarawas River to the south and the Ohio Canal through Akron to the north.
The closed gates on each of the 15 locks within the city of Akron became small dams, building up a head of water as high as eight feet above the lock. There were bypass channels around each lock, but the sudden increase in the volume of water from the Portage Lakes was too much. The crowds of people panicked and demanded the lock gates be dynamited. The gates of several locks within the city were blown open with dynamite, beginning with Lock 1 at Exchange Street on Monday night and including Locks 8 and 9 , just south of Market Street around noon on Tuesday. This uncoordinated destruction probably did little more than destroy the lock gates, damage some nearby buildings, and hastened the flood of water down the valley.
Local papers questioned who had authorized the destruction of State Property. Years later, stories were told about the flood and John Henry Vance, an engineer at the B F. Goodrich plant, who took credit for supervising the destruction of Lock 1, a Mr. Madden for Lock 8 plus the nearby Alexander Building, and the City Police for Lock 9.
When the pent up water from the reservoir feeders and the pools behind the Akron locks were unleashed, it tore through the valley, shoving buildings from their foundations and destroyed the canal channel from Akron to Peninsula. At Boston, local residents used 200 pounds of dynamite to blow up the mill dam in the Cuyahoga, hoping to relieve flooding in their town and sending torrents of water down the valley, destroying property and life along its banks. Along the Cleveland Flats, at the junction of the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie, devastation was tremendous, with docks, lumberyards, and businesses all swept away.
The Statewide extent of death and destruction due to the Flood of 1913 exceeds all other weather-related events in Ohio’s history. Rainfall over the State totaled 6 to 11 inches, and no part of the State was unaffected. The total death count was 467 and more than 40,000 homes were damaged or destroyed. The total property damage totaled more than $100 million dollars (in 1913 money). Homes, businesses and institutions across the State were destroyed by the flood and the State’s transportation system was severely damaged. With nearly every river bridge destroyed, trains swept off tracks, railroad yards destroyed, and railroad tracks torn up by the rampaging waters, it was months before the railways and highways were back to any semblance of their former efficiency.
Much of the northern section of the canal, that portion where the recent rebuilding had taken place, was in shambles, but there was never more than local efforts to repair it, and then only for hydraulic purposes. Through boating on the Ohio Canal had ceased during the height of the rebuild about 1905 or 06. The Flood of 1913, by washing away many of the canal’s feeder dams and seriously damaging it banks all along the line, put an end to the Ohio Canal as a viable, through transportation system.
(1) Editors note- The Flood of 1913 was a multi-state event caused by a winter storm. In addition to the damages to the Ohio Canals, it also great impacted work on New York’s new Barge Canal, which was being constructed at that time.