The Summit City: Canal Fever on the Maumee

On February twenty second, eighteen thirty two, workers broke ground in Fort Wayne for the Wabash and Erie Canal. They chose Washington's birthday deliberately. This was a national project, a statement about what the young republic could build.

What they built was extraordinary. Stretching four hundred sixty eight miles from Toledo, Ohio, to Evansville, Indiana, the Wabash and Erie Canal was among the longest artificial waterways ever constructed in the United States, often described as second in the world only to China's Grand Canal, though that global comparison is hard to confirm. And Fort Wayne sat at the highest point along its entire route, the summit through which boats had to be lifted and lowered. That geographic fact gave the city its nickname: the Summit City.

The canal transformed Fort Wayne almost overnight. Before it, the town was a frontier village of a few hundred souls. After it, warehouses and depots crowded the riverbanks. Hotels filled with travelers and merchants. The area known today as the Landing, along West Columbia Street, became a roaring commercial waterfront. Indiana's population nearly tripled in the fifteen years after the canal opened.

The labor that built it was largely immigrant. More than a thousand workers, many of them Irish who had just arrived in America, swung pickaxes and moved dirt for wages of about thirteen dollars a month. They dug the channel by hand, through swamps and hardpan clay, and they died of disease and accident at rates that were never fully counted.

The canal's golden era lasted barely thirty years. By the eighteen fifties, railroads were undercutting the canal boats on speed and cost. Traffic dwindled. By eighteen seventy four the canal was effectively abandoned. In eighteen eighty one, the Nickel Plate Railroad bought the channel's right-of-way and simply laid its tracks in the old canal bed.

The Summit City kept its name. The canal that earned it is gone.