Cascade Locks: The Staircase and the Oatmeal King
Near Akron, Ohio
Right here, carved into a ravine near the edge of downtown, you can still see the bones of one of the great engineering achievements of early America.
The Cascade Locks are the remains of a steep staircase of lift locks on the Ohio and Erie Canal. These locks permitted canal boats to ascend seventy feet in less than half a mile, reaching the Akron Summit, the highest point on a canal more than three hundred miles long. Nowhere else on the entire system did boats climb so steeply or so dramatically.
Each lock was a chamber with wooden gates at both ends. Boats entered, gates closed, and water flowed in from a higher level, lifting the boat. Then the upper gates opened and the boat moved forward into the next chamber. The process reversed going downhill, emptying water to lower the boat step by step. Lock tenders worked in all seasons, all weather, around the clock whenever commerce demanded.
At the foot of the locks, a German immigrant named Ferdinand Schumacher set up a mill in eighteen fifty-seven, renting water power from the canal to grind oats. Schumacher had noticed that Americans ate almost no oats, which struck him as strange because back in Germany, oats were a breakfast staple. He packaged and sold oatmeal to skeptical grocers, then watched demand explode during the Civil War when the federal government purchased his product in massive quantities to feed Union soldiers. His Jumbo mill eventually sold three hundred sixty thousand pounds of oatmeal daily at its peak. The company that grew from his mills became the Quaker Oats Company.
The canal survived until the Great Flood of nineteen thirteen, when rushing water destroyed locks up and down the system. The Cascade Locks Historic District was preserved and added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-two. You can walk among the stone-walled lock chambers today at Cascade Locks Park on East North Street, where the stones remain exactly where canal workers laid them nearly two centuries ago.
