Muskingum River: Ohio's Hand-Cranked Waterway

The Muskingum River below you is one of the engineering curiosities of the American frontier. In eighteen forty-one, workers finished a chain of ten hand-operated locks and eleven dams stretching more than ninety miles from Zanesville to the Ohio River. Designed by West Point graduate Samuel Curtis, the sandstone locks were built large enough to admit steamboats, each chamber roughly one hundred eighty-four feet long and thirty-six feet wide.

For the next seventy years, commercial river traffic moved raw materials east and manufactured goods west. Then the railroads arrived, and the boats stopped coming. Today those ten locks still work, still hand-cranked by rangers and volunteers, making the Muskingum the most intact hand-operated slackwater navigation system in the United States.

Recreational boaters are the only traffic now, but the mechanism is identical to what Ohio farm families built almost two centuries ago.