Junction: Where Two Great Canals Met

The small Paulding County village called Junction earned its name honestly. This was the point where the Miami and Erie Canal, running north from Cincinnati to Toledo, met the Wabash and Erie Canal, which stretched west from Junction across Indiana toward the Ohio River. When that connection was completed in the eighteen thirties and forties, Junction briefly became a genuine hub of inland commerce, with boats loading farm goods and transferring cargo between the two waterway systems.

The village also sat astride an Underground Railroad corridor; its canal-side inns and warehouses provided cover for freedom seekers moving north. The railroads killed the canal trade by the eighteen seventies, but hiking and biking trails now follow the old towpaths, and the village name still marks where two great engineering projects once shook hands.