The Canal That Made Cleveland

Before the canal, Cleveland was a village of about six hundred people clustered at the mouth of a river nobody much needed. After the canal, it was one of the most important commercial junctions in North America. The transformation took less than a decade.

The Ohio and Erie Canal opened its first segment, from Akron to Cleveland, on July fourth, eighteen twenty-seven. When the full three-hundred-and-eight-mile route was complete in eighteen thirty-two, linking Lake Erie at Cleveland to the Ohio River at Portsmouth, the effect was immediate and total. Farmers in the interior of Ohio suddenly had access to markets in New York City via Lake Erie and the Erie Canal. Goods manufactured in the east moved in the opposite direction. Cleveland sat at the hinge of the whole system.

Warehouses and shipyards rose along the Cuyahoga River banks. Raw materials arriving from the interior, iron ore, coal, timber, wheat, were turned into manufactured goods by the factories that sprang up alongside the docks. The city's population doubled and doubled again. Within a generation, Cleveland had grown from that small village into one of the largest cities in the country, a place where a young man from upstate New York could arrive with almost nothing in eighteen fifty-five and within fifteen years found the largest corporation in the United States.

The canal era ended in less than thirty years. The railroads arrived in the eighteen fifties and made the slow-moving canal boats obsolete almost overnight. But the industrial pattern the canal established, the refineries, the steel mills, the concentration of capital along the river, outlasted the boats and the locks by a century.

The towpaths and some of the locks still exist in the Cuyahoga Valley. The park was established in two thousand to protect what the canal made possible.