Ohio Magazine
www.ohiomagazine.com Issue Date: February 2006 Issue
Ruins at
Red Lock
Letter from the Ohio and Erie Canal
Every place has its ghosts. So did
our neck of the Cuyahoga Valley. But real ghosts are not
the silly creatures of stories, alternately lovable or
malevolent, and always a bit frightening. Neither are
they human in form, at least not always. Real ghosts
are, in the older sense of the word, the restless
spirits of those things that the world has not properly
buried. Something unavenged. Unfulfilled. Unappreciated.
At any rate, the thing’s final chapter was never
written, leaving behind a tormented spirit drifting
restlessly across the land, pursuing its final justice
not with frights or cruel tricks but with gentle sighs
and soft reminders. These usually go unnoticed by the
world that forgot to finish their graves.
As a boy, I regularly rubbed elbows
with the sad ghost of the Ohio and Erie Canal. Of
course, I didn’t recognize the watery specter for what
is was, but odd hints of its presence touched me from
time to time. Red Lock Hill, for example, was as much a
part of our landscape as our ball field and the nearby
waterfall. Sweeping steeply down to the Cuyahoga Valley
floor, the hill was the breaking point for school bus
drivers in January and bicyclists in August.
The only extant section of the canal
of more than a mile or two began just to the north of us
and ran as far as Cleveland’s thirsty factories which,
in the brutally materialistic spirit of the 1950s, were
only interested in the water that the ditch conveniently
brought to their doors. The highway that accompanied the
waterway along its humbling trek was dutifully named
Canal Road, a route we took to church each Sunday. At
the point where the canal and the road separate, the
ribbon of water danced coyly around the back of a hill
and out of sight before petering out.
“I wonder where it goes. I wish I
could get out and follow it,” I would think to myself,
tantalized by the prospect of a storybook land where
canals go on forever. Even many years later, as a
presumably well-educated adult, I did not connect the
canal (or, at least its dry path) to the bottom of Red
Lock Hill and then right through Red Lock itself.
Red Lock, the 34th of 44 original
locks between Akron and Cleveland, was so named because
a long-forgotten lockkeeper painted part of it red. A
hundred and fifty years ago, everything about the canal
was intensely personal. Numbers wouldn’t do for locks
any more than they would do for a settlement (and, in
fact, the two names were often synonymous). Red Lock’s
neighbor locks sported handles such as Johnnycake, Mud
Catcher, Pancake, Lonesome and Whiskey.
The lock and the stretch of the canal
at the base of Red Lock Hill danced along a hotbed of
history. This area was the cutting edge for the nation’s
great Indian wars, treaty lines and interior economic
expansion. Northfield Township was chosen as one of the
first work sites for the canal laborers, and when they
began digging out Red Lock they stumbled on a rich
burial site that yielded an early French trade gun,
contemporary with what were probably the first white
faces in the valley. But all of that was buried under a
shaggy covering of trees, weeds and moss by the time we
kids made our childhood sojourns through the area in the
1950s. The ruins of the lock escaped our usually
intensive curiosity — for many years I assumed it was a
wrecked bridge of some kind — while the old canal bed
was nothing more than a faint, wet depression wandering
through a woods no one traveled.
It did not take Nature any great
length of time, especially by her standards, to reclaim
the early 19th-century scratch on her surface. Beyond
the ruins of Red Lock my boyhood days found only the
faintest hint of a directional line heading north toward
Cleveland. An unsuspecting hiker in the woods would miss
it altogether.
As Dad and I walked the line during a
gray day in 1990, I thought of the melons I used to grow
up on top of the hill a generation before. In June the
vines of those melon plants were rich and green,
thrusting and climbing with so much vigor that I had to
reroute them back into the garden every day. But when
fall came, the vines had become thin pencil lines on the
ground, unmoved for weeks, now pumping every ounce of
their waning energy into the pulpy fruits blossoming at
the ends of their reach. It was a ritualistic, seasonal
suicide; the vines would die so that the fruits could
live.
That was the canal’s story. A teeming
waterway cut through a primeval jungle, 4 feet deep, 26
feet wide at the bottom and 40 feet at the surface, now
lay almost invisible on the cluttered carpet of the
woods floor, while the distant fruits of her labor —
Cleveland, Akron, Massillon and others — continued to
ripen along her shadowy line on the earth’s floor.
It is a fair bet that most northern
Ohioans today, like that boy growing up atop Red Lock
Hill, have virtually no awareness of their debt to the
Canal ghost laving in misty swirls at their feet. We
have enough trouble remembering the history of the
canal-killing railroads — and they are yet with us. A
fading phrase (“Low bridge!”) or dusty song (“Fifteen
Years on the Erie Canal”) are about the best even the
older ones among us can do for the fabulous Canal Era in
the second quarter of 19th-century America. We no longer
notice — as Washington and Jefferson immediately did —
that only a few miles of high, dry ground around Akron
interrupt a fabulous natural water route connecting the
nation’s Atlantic seaboard to the Port of New Orleans.
Simply put, Ohio’s canal would economically link the
hemispheres of the world.
Still, the thing seemed a risky long
shot in 1819. There was enormous opposition to a $5
million project in a state whose treasury held only
$133,000, and at a time when central government
expenditures were viewed with considerable suspicion.
Eventually, the completed section between Akron and
Cleveland celebrated its maiden packet voyage when the
State of Ohio hauled into Cleveland on July 4, 1827. But
that boat contained only the political bigwigs and their
inexhaustible supply of hot air and ego. That same day
there came a second canal boat, less noticed by the
celebrating crowds but of far greater importance. This
one was a freighter carrying wheat — wheat that the day
before had sold for 25 cents a bushel, but would sell
the next day for 75 cents. Wheat merchants from Buffalo,
who had purchased only 1,000 bushels the year before the
Canal opened, were buying 250,000 bushels within a year
of the State of Ohio’s ceremonial voyage.
Cleveland and Akron, respectively a
diseased swamp and an Indian trail crossing in the early
19th century, exploded into major American cities
virtually the moment they were connected to the thin
ribbon of slack water.
But how many of us today know (or
care) about such things? And so the ghost sings its
sighing song along the Cuyahoga Valley floor. Of course,
the Cuyahoga Valley National Park has done wonderful
work in restoring some of the old locks and long
stretches of the tow path, but I wonder if those
well-manicured hiking trails with their Nike-soled
pedestrians will ever reflect the brutal glory of the
Great Ditch: of the sad-eyed Irish laborers whose
malarial deaths in the dozens are hidden in forgotten
graves along the route; of savage fights among the boat
crews for the economically crucial first passage rights
through the locks; of 60-ton canal freighters sitting
like toy boats in a drained bathtub after canal walls
gave in to the determined digging of muskrats or the
unscrupulous tricks of contractors.
Who can ever lay such ghosts to rest?
I think that is where the Canal ghost
was born, there among the choking weeds 20 feet north of
Highland Road. What I assumed to be the concrete
abutments of an old bridge were actually the
magnificently sculptured walls of huge sandstone blocks
that, unmolested by the fickle nature of man’s changing
mind, might have preserved those locks forever. For half
a century, the wealth of a nation passed through those
walls, coursing a rich supply of economic blood to
Akron, Cleveland, New York, and New Orleans. But for the
better part of a century they had not received even a
passing glance from the people in the speeding cars.
Those cars, along with the busy Baltimore and Ohio
trains across river, were the respective grandchildren
and children of this mother of transportation in Ohio.
But they had neglected to properly lay her to rest.
