Miami and Erie Canal Lock Fifteen

Between eighteen thirty-three and eighteen thirty-seven, laborers mostly Irish immigrants dug and stone-lined this section of the Miami and Erie Canal through what is now western Ohio. Lock Fifteen was one of the critical elevation steps in a system designed to connect the Ohio River at Cincinnati with Lake Erie at Toledo, a distance of about two hundred seventy-five miles.

Before the canal, farmers hauling grain overland paid enormous costs in time and broken wagons. The canal cut freight rates dramatically and opened regional markets that had been unreachable. Towns along the route grew almost overnight. The canal era lasted only a few decades before railroads made it obsolete, and the locks were gradually abandoned. What you see here is one of the better-preserved remnants of a vast public works project that briefly transformed the Ohio interior, a stone staircase for boats that helped build the Midwest.