Wabash & Erie Canal: A History of Connecting People and Places

by Tom Castaldi

During 1835, a new travel corridor was completed through Allen and Huntington counties in Indiana. It was destined to build and grow the state's economy.

Ground was broken in 1832, and the Wabash & Erie Canal was by 1843 completed between the head of steamboat navigation on the Wabash River at Lafayette, Indiana, and Toledo, Ohio, at the shores of Lake Erie.

The canal was extended through Terre Haute, Indiana, and by 1853 connected with Evansville, Indiana, on the Ohio River. It operated as the longest canal in the western hemisphere until the courts ordered it to close operations in 1874 and was sold by 1876.

Earlier in 1827, surveyors had been sent out to mark a line for the waterway. First they looked for a route to connect the Maumee River in Fort Wayne with the Wabash River. An ancient land portage led them to the forks of the Little Wabash and Wabash rivers west of present-day Huntington. From here they followed the Wabash that established a connection with the Ohio River and on to the Mississippi.

After long stretches of level ground were surveyed, contractors arrived with labors to clear the land and dig the line. Engineers designed and built locks in the channel to help step boats up or down the terrain. Aqueducts, arches and culverts were constructed to cross streams as were road bridges made to cross the canal. Dams erected in the nearby Wabash provided replenishing water to the canal through feeders. Large turnaround basins had to be excavated, floodgates installed and other intricate devices created to control the water that continue to amaze present-day observers. In the end, laborers with their hand tools and draft animals completed the work that brought prosperity to an entire region.

Because of the canal's nearly motionless water current, it was possible for long narrow packet boats and freight barges towed by horses or mules to move easily through the Ohio and Indiana wilderness. The Wabash & Erie brought people to Indiana in the 1840s and '50s as well as moved grain, livestock, lime, salt and general freight to eager buyers back east. An uninterrupted water passage had been opened from the eastern seaboard through Lake Erie, via the Wabash & Erie to points west or on down to the Gulf of Mexico.

Water from the canal was used to power mills that processed grain and sawed wood. With water machinery materials were made that people wanted to buy, and in turn developed communities in northern, western and southwestern Indiana.

From its beginnings, the Wabash & Erie Canal was a work connecting people and places for the betterment of both.