Port Washington: Canal Town on the Ohio and Erie

The town was laid out in eighteen twenty-seven, and the Ohio and Erie Canal made the location look brilliant. The village was first laid out under the name Salisbury, and a post office called Port Washington has operated there since eighteen thirty-two. The canal turned Port Washington into a major inland port on the route between Cleveland and Portsmouth, and farmers hauled produce from fifty miles around along the old Port Washington Road to ship it north.

By the middle of the nineteenth century Port Washington had grown into a busy village with groceries, mills, taverns, shops, and churches. Then the railroad arrived, extending the boom into the second half of the century. The canal eventually silted and the railroad declined, but in its prime Port Washington was a model of how a single infrastructure investment could turn a rural Tuscarawas County creek into a commercial crossroads. The census counted two hundred sixty-nine people in eighteen fifty and a peak of six hundred thirty-four in eighteen eighty. The landscape painter Alexander Helwig Wyant was born in Port Washington in eighteen thirty-six. After a stroke paralyzed his right arm in eighteen seventy-three, he taught himself to paint with his left hand.