Editor’s note- The late Dr. Karen Grey coined a phrase called “Zombie History,” where incorrect history is handed down through the generations, and it is accepted and repeated as truth. Terry does a bit of Zombie History killing in this Canal Comments about the “last” boatman on the Miami and Erie Canal. Here is his article with his own introduction.
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A week or so ago I ran across an item on the Internet titled, the Last Ohio Canal Boat. I copied it in the hope of using it as a column. BUT, the history was so inaccurate that I thought it might have been written as a “joke”. In this account the number of locks mentioned between Akron and Cleveland were wrong. And it stated the first boat on the Ohio Canal left Akron on July 1st, when it is well documented that it left Akron the day before the opening ceremonies of that first stretch of the Ohio Canal on July 4th.
AND, the author of that “joke piece” stated that “the clarinet became the instrument of the canal.” I, personally can’t imagine a canal boatman giving up his Banjo or Violin for a clarinet, or even recognizing one.
But. subsequent browsing through the Internet produced a couple of articles that contained a bit on “The last Boatman on the Miami & Erie Canal”. So. I’ve written today’s column using that topic and the information from those two articles, plus a bit of general knowledge about the Miami & Erie Canal.
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THE LAST OHIO CANAL BOATMAN ON THE MIAMI & ERIE CANALi
There was no ceremony and little notice when the last canal boat pulled out of Hamilton over 100 years ago. In fact, the man who claimed to have been the captain on that final run, later, wasn’t entirely sure of the exact date when he, Bertus Havens, tried to recall that unheralded experience on the Miami & Erie Canal.
“She was the LADY HAMILTON, built at a boat yard in Hamilton” (now considered a suburb of Cincinnati) as was stated in a letter Bertus wrote in 1974, recalling what he believed to be that last trip from Hamilton.
In a later interview Haven’s stated that, “I pulled her from what is now the intersection of High Street and Erie Highway here in Hamilton, . . . down to Lockland’s Collector’s Locks. There, another crew took her down to Cincinnati, just below 12th. Street.” After her cargo was unloaded, wheels were placed under the LADY HAMILTON and she was towed the short distance to the Ohio River. From there she was transported to Chicago for service on the Illinois & Michigan Canal.
Havens, who rather enjoyed his self-proclaimed title of the “last boatman on the Miami & Erie Canal” was born on January 27, 1882 in Hamilton, when the canal was already in decline. It had been opened from Middletown south to Hamilton by August of 1827, and later extended to Cincinnati. Eventually, through a series of extensions, the canal connected the Ohio River at Cincinnati to Lake Erie at Toledo.
The Miami Canal was begun with a ground-breaking on July 21, 1825 on Daniel Doty’s farm, then south of Middletown. By August 1827, trips between Hamilton and Middletown were possible. The canal reached Cincinnati later that year. Eventually, through two expansion projects, the canal connected the Ohio River at Cincinnati with Lake Erie at Toledo. In January, 1849, the Ohio State Legislature renamed the Miam Canal and the various extensions, as the Miami & Erie Canal.
The Miami & Erie Canal experienced a great “run of traffic” both freight and passengers for a number of years. But in 1851, the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton Railroad was completed and the bulk of passengers and freight in the area soon were being transferred from the canal to the railroad, and traffic on 249 mile long Miami & Erie Canal fell off drastically.
There was an attempted rebuild of the Miami & Erie and the northern section of the Ohio & Erie from 1905 through 1909. But the appropriations, and public support ran out at the end of the 1909 construction season and the rebuild was not continued. Then the devastating March 1913 flood ended all hopes of resuming long distance traffic on Ohio’s towpath canals.
Havens, at age 21, was in Troop H, 8th U.S. Cavalry, at Jefferson Barracks, south of St. Louis, about to begin an 18 month tour in the Philippines. Later, he was a mounted policeman in Cheyenne, Wyoming, before returning to Hamilton to work on the Miami & Erie Canal in its final years.
That portion of the canal Havens worked on was near the end of its lifetime when he worked on it. “The traffic was light and about to end”, he said. “Drivers were being paid $18.00 a month, plus board, while I was employed on the canal.
“I worked for awhile with what they called the ‘Electric Mule’, which was a failure,” he recalled. “They tried to pull two and three boats at a time, which was O.K. if they went slow, each boat behind the other.”
“But when they would try to go fast, it would push all the water ahead of the boats, and then the rear boats slid on the muddy bottom and the tow line would break. Then the boats would stop, the water would rush back, and the boats would just bob around.”
The Electric Mules were small electric-powered railway locomotives used in an attempt to replace horses and mules to pull canal boats. This new system also required the installation of rails and overhead trolley wires along the towpath. The rails also interfered with the easy passing of standard horses and mules.
Havens apparently left the canal after his “Last Canal Boatman“ trip and was later employed by the U.S. Navy as an instrument maker for 30 years, working at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii from 1940 to 1952.
Bertus Garfield Havens died on November 12, 1981 in Campbell California, less than three months before his 100th birthday. He is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Hamilton under a tombstone that proudly proclaims the he was the “Last of the Canal Boatmen” on the Miami & Erie Canal!
BUT! I can’t wonder about the men that “took over” the LADY HAMILTON” on those final few miles into Cincinnati back in 1907 or 08.
AND! Additional research has uncovered a small paragraph in a piece put on the Internet by the Butler County Lane Library that states, in part, “Freight boats disappeared from the canal by the early 1900s, and long-distance passenger service vanished before that. And then the 1913 flood demolished a number of upstream locks and destroyed miles of the canal’s channel. It is believed that a final excursion boat on the Cincinnati section of the canal was made hosting a party for a gathering of the “Free Settlers,” a society made up exclusively of men, and apparently dedicated to “the proposition” of beer drinking. That voyage began, on July 27, 1917, “fittingly”, at the Gerke Brewery on the canal’s Plumb Street Bend, and ended at Bruckman’s, near the Ludlow Aqueduct”.
But since the names of the boatmen who took the LADY HAMILTON down to Cincinnati, and any captain of the beer drinker’s craft is lost in antiquity, let’s all say that Bertus Garfield Haven was the “Last Boatmen on the Miami & Erie Canal”. After all, it says so on his tombstone!
i Much of the information for this column came from, “Last Miami-Erie Canal Boatman”, By Jim Blount, and “MIAMI-ERIE CANAL” – The Lane Library, Butler County, both copied from the internet on February 1, 2022.