Canals, the National Road, and Ohio's First Infrastructure Age

In the eighteen twenties, getting a barrel of flour from a farm in central Ohio to a market in New York City cost more than the flour was worth. The roads were rutted tracks that turned to mud in spring and froze into obstacle courses in winter. The young state was rich in farmland and poor in everything else.

Then came the canals. Ohio broke ground on the Ohio and Erie Canal on July fourth, eighteen twenty-five, deliberately chosen to echo the Erie Canal groundbreaking in New York eight years earlier. By eighteen thirty-two, the canal ran three hundred eight miles from Cleveland on Lake Erie down through the Cuyahoga and Scioto valleys to Portsmouth on the Ohio River.

The Miami and Erie Canal followed a western route, connecting Cincinnati to Toledo. At their peak, the Ohio canals carried enormous freight tonnage. The National Road arrived from the east.

Authorized by Congress in eighteen oh six, it was the first federally funded interstate highway in American history, a graded, graveled, sometimes macadamized road that ran from Cumberland, Maryland, west through the mountains to Wheeling, crossed into Ohio at the river, and pushed on through Zanesville, Columbus, and Springfield toward Indiana. It was the main artery for westward migration for a generation. Stagecoaches, wagons, herds of livestock, families with everything they owned in a single cart, all moved along it.

The railroads arrived in the eighteen forties and fifties and made both canals economically obsolete within a decade. The canal towns that had boomed became the railroad towns that boomed again, or they became quiet backwaters. The towpaths, where horses and mules once walked pulling boat lines taut, are today hiking and cycling trails in the Cuyahoga Valley and along the old Miami and Erie.

The infrastructure age never really ends; it just changes materials.