Terry K. Woods’ Canal Comments – The Sugar Creek Crossing

Terry begins with;

Hi Guys:

One of the perks of wring this column, with no editors and no publishers, is that I get to write what I want the way I want it. That is also one of the downsides. I have no one to make sure I write a good one.

This column was supposed to be a straight historical description of the Sugar Creek Crossing just below Canal Dover. Instead, it reads more like, “How a spent several summer vacations”. Anyway, here it is. Hope you like it.

THE SUGAR CREEK CROSSING

In the 306+ miles of canal between Lake Erie to the Ohio River, the Ohio Canal crossed over various streams fourteen times using an aqueduct, and eight times in a slack-water pool built up behind a damⁱ. While an aqueduct is an imposing structure and slack-water pools are probably not considered such, the slack-water crossing of Sugar Creek below Canal Dover on the Ohio Canal has always held a particular fascination for many an avid canal buff.

The dam, itself, is described rather tersely in the Canal Commissioner’s Report for the year 1832.

“Ninety-Three miles south of Cleveland the Ohio Canal crosses Sugar Creek, a major tributary of the Tuscarawas River in the pool of a dam, this dam is constructed of a double row of closely spaced pilings, filled between the rows with stone, and brush, and gravel, and covered with plank, laid upon plates resting upon and secured to the heads of each row of piles with an extensive apron of hewn timber and abutments of cut stone founded upon bearing piles, the waters of the stream may consequently be commanded for the use of the canal, but the supply of water furnished by the feeder at Zoar is so abundant that it has been found unnecessary to appropriate any part of them to the purpose of navigation.”

I was first shown the remains of the Sugar Creek Crossing in 1967 by an avid canal buff named Richard Williams. Richard had a plane and several times we went “canal looking” from the air. I’ve had at least one column on these trips. This time though, we scrambled through barriers of high, thick brush to find the actual site. I was into that site several times again during the 1980s and ‘70s.

The crossing had been updated during the 1908-09 rebuild and the northern stone dam abutment replaced with a large concrete sluice (similar to the one in the canal towpath in the Craig-Pittman Trailhead just south of Navarre). In its most recent iteration, the dam was paced off to be some 50 to 60 yards long. That new Sugar Creek Dam and Sluice was constructed in 1909 (contract let on Oct 13, 1908) by Clark and Meldy for $5,761.71.

Apparently, the dam remained as a ‘refurbished’ wood-crib structure as little more than a raised line of fine stone marked it’s former location when I searched for it. The first time I was in that area alone and rediscovered the one remaining stone dam abutment, I approached it from the creek side and was quite impressed with the find.

A guard lock was located some 2,300 feet below the dam. It raised northbound boats to the momentary level of the slack-water crossing and protected the lower canal from high water, but it was, apparently, removed during the 1900s rebuild of the dam and crossing.

It took me quite a while to determine why the guard lock was so far below the slack-water crossing. Then, while perusing some Board of Public Works Reports, I ran across an item mentioning the need to repair the outlet lock for the New Philadelphia Lateral Canal. That sidecut exited the Ohio Canal just above the guard lock above a rebuild of the old Baker Mill Dam. The guard lock was required to be so far away from the crossing so that the Lateral could exit the main canal in the Sugar Creek slack-water level

In 1976, Don Baker, a reporter from the New Philadelphia Times-Reporter asked me to guide him to each of the remaining canal structures in Tuscarawas County for a Sunday Supplement segment he was preparing. We did this run in the month of July, and foliage was very high, almost too high, to get into the sites, let alone take coherent color photos, but the resulting Sunday piece was a good one.

The Sugar Creek Crossing was one of those sites. The Union Camp Chemical Company was then occupying the entire area containing the crossing artifacts and had constructed some sort of processing plant and a cooling-water pond near the southern property line. The plant was vacant except for one security personnel the hot Sunday afternoon we made our journey and he was more than happy to relieve the tedium by showing us around. I gained a ‘perk’ by picking his brain concerning the New Philadelphia Lateral Canal which this security guard had swam in during his boyhood.

In 1982, Ted Kasper and I led a Canal Society of Ohio tour of Tuscarawas County. Ted gained the friendship of a gentleman from New Philadelphia whose name I no longer remember, but happened to be the Public Relations Director for the Union Camp Chemical Company. This man gave us complete freedom to visit the canal artifacts adjacent to the chemical company. Naturally, it was a high point of the tour.

I spent a great deal of time scouring that area in preparation for the tour. I came in through the chemical plant access road many times and once I even came in along the railroad tracks from the north, but couldn’t get onto the actual dam site from that direction as Sugar Creek was flowing strong and wide across my path. After the 1913 flood had destroyed the dam, the creek cut a new channel just to the north of the “new” concrete sluice.

During those last few visits onto the site I discovered that, during flood times, the creek was undercutting one wall of the sluice. At least 18” of the supporting wooden pilings were exposed. I was fearful that half of that concrete structure might soon collapse.

The rebuild had included concrete waste-ways about 30 yards before and after the dam, plus culverts to carry any surplus rain water away from the structure into the near-by Tuscarawas River. During one of my trips there in the ‘80s I discovered a wrecked 1955 Plymouth lying in the south culvert access ditch.

That whole area has been closed to the general public since the late ‘80s. Unfortunately, I may have been the cause of that censure. Shortly after the tour, I wrote to the head of the chemical plant suggesting that the company and the Canal Society of Ohio work together to get that area north of their plant declared a National Historic Landmark. Apparently, the company officials felt any such designation might jeopardize their work area and the Sugar Creek Slack-water Crossing was closed off. For that I am truly sorry.

I did get into that area one more time. In December of 2009 I wrote to the chemical company asking for permission to explore the area. The CSO was again planning a tour of Tuscarawas County and I wanted to include that area. On January 10, 2010, I was escorted around the area by a company official. He was quite gracious and let me see whatever I wanted to see, but access for the tour was denied. I took notes of that last excursion and may use it as a column in the near future.

i A GLOSSARY OF TERMS of the Ohio & Erie Canal, Terry K. Woods, KENT STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2008.