Terry’s introduction- Last Saturday the Canal Society of Ohio held its annual spring tour of a portion of Ohio Canal Land. This tour ran from Newcomerstown on the Ohio & Erie to Coshocton then up the Walhonding Canal to the Muskingum Conservancy’s 1935 “answer” to the 1913 flood – The Mohawk Dam.
The first portion of the tour went from Coshocton along the River Route (there is a shorter Hill Route) through Canal Lewisville to Newcomerstown. As luck would have it, I recently ran across something I’ve had in my files for many years, an account of a motor tour from Coshocton to Newcomerstown in 1907! Apparently I had never read it thoroughly before as, buried in its contents, was reference to a mill at Wild Turkey Lock (No. 25) and another one, probably at Lock 24.
Anyway, I thought you might like to have a look at the Ohio Canal, the roads, and the Tuscarawas River in the wild (then and still little bit now) section of Coshocton County.
UP THE TUSCARAWAS – 1907.i
John promised to meet us at the corner Main and Forth Streets at 7am sharp, but we knew that was to avoid contention. Seven is not on his day trick. His folks have no knowledge of his ever having seen the sun as early as seven. If he had his way he’d have it rise at 9 instead of 5.
By an extraordinary struggle with the bed covers, he managed to turn the corner at 8:15, but not with that dash and exuberance of spirits characteristic of him when a party of the other sex awaits him. His look seemed to say that this thing is going to be mighty monotonous with nothing but men. And he began to recite his fears as to one of the tires, a leak in the water tank, the weather, the obstinacy of the sparker and other vicissitudes of autoing; but to no avail, for we insisted on going at all hazards.
We started up the River Road for West Lafayette. The Hill Road is the shorter; but the camera whispered something about the river, the canal and the old locks – the picturesque things.
John held the throttle. Ed puffed clouds of smoke from his two-fors, with nothing on his mind but a derby, while C. M. and the writer kept a sharp lookout for the pretty spots.
We dashed across the Tuscarawas river bridge into that uncertain triangular piece of land between Coshocton and Roscoe and the Tuscarawas and Walhonding rivers, known as “The Forks.” Circling around the mill, we started up the river bottoms along the fields of corn, but not without a look back over our shoulders at picturesque Roscoe, holding on to the steep hillside.
Roscoe is the quaint old canal metropolis of Coshocton county, now more of a residential adjunct to Coshocton.
The water power from the Walhonding canal rolls the wheels of two flouring mills and a planning mill only, but is being harnessed by the State for greater things. The Coshocton Electric Light Company will build a mammoth power plant where the water spills over into the river below.ii
Roscoe always appeals to the artist, with its quaint, old early-canal-day buildings backed up against the canal. Much oil and water-color has been spread over its scenes; and being stuck up on a hillside, it affords some remarkable birdseye views of three rivers, two canals, three basins, an aqueduct and a railway trestle, to say nothing of the hills and valleys leading out in various directions, and the busy city of Coshocton across the two rivers.
The Forks is rich in Indian history. The two races met here in the early days, but did not always harmonize and go off together as peacefully as the Walhonding and the Tuscarawas into the Muskingum below. Much blood was shed in the primeval forests of this neighborhood.
The Forks is near the site of the capital of the Delawares. Here it was the objective point of the Bouquet treaty in 1764 and the scene of the famous Bouquet expedition of the War of the Revolution, sometimes known as the Coshocton Campaign. While up along the valleys of the Walhonding, Tuscarawas and Muskingum are many other points of interest in Indian history, as well as several evidences of the Mound Builders time.
A few explosions of gasoline and we were in Canal Lewisville, a little canal hamlet with enough of the ramshackle to make a good picture. We stopped the automobile just right for a flock of geese on the towing path to pose beautifully and kept their eyes on Ed as they were requested.
The run from Canal Lewisville to the West Lafayette bridge is a delightful one. First the road is on one side of the canal, and then the other while the river whips up close one minute and the next shies off around that big bend then disappears among the Sycamores. Among the refreshing local places that marked our progress up the canal are McGuire’s Grove, Wild Turkey lock, Rush Island Pond and Shaw’s Bottoms.
Wild Turkey Lock was once the seat of a flouring mill. The writer remembers in his boyhood some delightful trips to the mill with the “hired hand.” The turtles slipped into the water so interestingly, and the canal boats in those days pointed their prows around the bend more majestically than a big ship breaks over the horizon into New York harbor now, from the standpoint of the same observer.
Leaving the canal bank and turning south at the river bridge, near the mouth of White Eyes creek, we made a bee line for West Lafayette, passing Plain Hill – an eminence set out on the plain like a long mound, from which peculiarity it gets its name.
West Lafayette is a thriving town of a thousand people, and has two enamel and two wooden novelty factories. Besides, it is a college town, the seat of West Lafayette College, a well known, but youthful institution of higher learning. West Lafayette has a splendid location – a high gravelly plain, surrounded by a beautiful framework of gentle hills about a mile away, both north and south, and without a “wash” or other harsh lines on them to mar the land-scape. To the writer, it has another charm. It is his home – the effulgence which does not depend upon rural beauty or commercial progress.
Going directly east from West Lafayette we went through that part of the Tuscarawas valley known as White Eyes Plains, a valley from a mile to nearly two miles wide, fine farm land and thickly settled.
But for the picturesque we turned off at Waggoner’s Corner for the river and the canal, and more particularly to the old canal town of Orange, which now has but eight families. In fact it never had a metropolitan population. As a post office, the town of Orange was first known as White Eyes Plain, and later Evansburgh. But now a rural route has invaded the place and made it unnecessary to dignify some citizen with the title of postmaster. Here we saw signs of the revival of the old canal, in the building of a new swing bridge. Up the canal farther the improvements are more frequent. The little canal towns expect to see more of the mules again.
The West Lafayette to Orange trip could be made by another route, passing the famous Blue Hole, The Falls, the lock where once stood the Emerson mill and other picturesque delights of the eye along a popular stretch of river for fishermen and campers.
A little east of Orange is the site of a much older town, Evansburg, long since obliterated by old age and a cyclone – once quite a busy place, whither farmers brought their wheat to be shipped out on the canal.
From Orange we turned back on The Plains, passing the old “Rock Fort,” a small stone building with rifle portholes through its walls, now very old and crumbling. It has received a good deal of attention in recent years from the photographers and historically inclined. It is said by some to have been built by the Evanses, the first settlers; yet the scions of that family seem to know nothing about it. Its mystery is its charm, and we have no disposition to investigate too far for fear that no Indians were ever shot from its portholes and that its purpose was more mill than blood.
Passing Isleta, a neat one-store hamlet on the Pennsylvania railroad, we flew up the Plains through clouds of dust towards Newcomerstown.
West of Newcomerstown we struck the Antietem of river destruction known as the Miskimen Bottoms. Here the river has changed its course every time it looked like rain, and keeps the Coshocton county commissioners perplexed almost as much as their second terms. The first mark of it is the long double-barreled Miskimen wooden bridge, spanning a pasture field. It is a Puckingham Truss and was built by the Hagertys of Nashport, in the fifties.
From this bridge we follow a big “fill” where some adjoining farms have been hauled in to put the road above high water. Next we strike the iron bridge, the second built on this spot, the first going down in the flood of 1903. Here the river makes angry swipes at both ends of the bridge and has drained all Central Ohio of piling and sandstone, and is still whipping her tail in her violent demands for more appropriations. At this point there are in operation several teams. Making a short cut in the river and at the same time making a road above high water for nearly a half mile at the other end of the bridge. And an abutment for another span of the bridge is now being built.
A little further east we cross a fill through a pool of deep blue water. This marks the spot of another old wooden bridge, which spanned the Tuscarawas in one of its fickle moods in the Miskimen Bottoms.
Newcomerstown is a growing town of nearly four thousand people. It has one immense factory, the Clew & Company pipe works, which employ several hundred men and a file factory, some brick factories and other smaller concerns. It has two newspapers, two banks, a new park donated by George Mulvane and many other city airs.
This town gets its name from a tradition. The old chief of the Indian village at the upper end of the present site of the town brought home from one of his expeditions a white wife, number two who was called the “newcomer.” Wife number one was not pleased with the situation and effectively used a tomahawk on the newcomer, thus establishing a good healthy tradition.
Three or four miles east of Newcomerstown is the site of a depopulated mining town called Glasgow, a little off the Port Washington Road. It was a settlement in connection with an iron mine which was opened there by a Scotch company along in the seventies. The mine proved a failure. It is said the iron cost $2.50 per ton more than it brought. The young men in charge were sons of the rich Scotch owners and spent money lavishly. One of them was a Coates, of the Coates thread manufacturing people of Glasgow. A well known Newcomerstown man tells of them paying him five dollars for holding their horses while they called on some friends. In time the rich fathers grew tired of the way things were going and stopped the flow of gold, which, it is said, had reached nearly three millions of dollars. At one time this little village of Glasgow had one thousand people.
Just this side of Port Washington, a mile or so, we passed the site of the little Norman settlement of Salem, where some authorities claim was born the first white child in Ohio. There is nothing left to mark the place.
Port Washington is another little Tuscarawas valley town of about five hundred people. It has a nicely shaded one-hundred-feet main street and an open square. It did have two woodwork factories. Both are now in ashes. It is a canal “port,” but the Pennsylvania railroad is nowadays getting the most travel.
Leaving Port Washington, we continued up the valley, the road keeping north of the canal, on the opposite side from the river. There is no special mark of industry before reaching Lock 17, except the Buchler Bro’s tile works, which is as isolated from any town as a sheep barn. The drive is just rural scenery – corn, wheat, canal, river, hills, wild flox, elderberries, cat tails, cattle and pond lilies.
Lock 17 is a hamlet with a mill, a store and a railroad station, and barely enough people to keep the village storekeeper from getting lonesome rainy days and Saturday nights. Here the general farming is varied somewhat by tomatoes and the like, and there is a big glass covered house on the hillside for the early growth of tomato plants and lettuce.
One mile farther, we reach our destination, Ganadenhutten, and dinner, which latter function was delayed because of so much photography en route and an hour and a half’s perplexity near Newcomerstown over the loss of a bolt. When one loses a bolt of an automobile he has a much greater respect for horses and other beasts of burden.
Leaving the village hotel we stopped at the local cemetery and the monuments to the over 90 ‘converted’ Christian Indians who were massacred by Pittsburgh militiamen.
Our return trip was almost as refreshing as the first. Up the Tuscarawas and down the Tuscarawas are two different panoramas. Either is charming in its variety. You pass the vestibule train and the weary canal boat. You pass the palatial home and the log cabin, covered with the wild trumpet vine. You ride along broad sweeps of waving corn and you hug some hillside under the shade of the oaks and the projecting coal chutes and berry bushes.
Variety – charming variety, everywhere. No moment do you know the full charm of the scene that will greet you around the turn as you fly along the Tuscarawas Valley.
As we ran down the Plains it was nearing sunset. The rabbits were bolder, and the lovers, too. The latter sat closer as the sun was going down. Some of the worsted had a continuous effect over the buggy seat, which situation had to be readjusted when the horse began to recognize the automobile, but the love of one young swain near Port Washington was sufficient to hold his horse with only one hand.
As the evening shades were growing deep, we reached “the Experimental Farm,” the home of the writer, and John, Ed, and C. M. went on their last eight miles by the Hill Road to our starting point, Coshocton.
i Up The Tuscarawas, by Harry Ferguson. OHIO MAGAZINE, March, 1907 Pgs 422-427.
ii The water from the Walhonding Canal emptied into Roscoe Basin.