Welcome
Cascade Locks
Looking south upstream from Lock 12 in the Cascade Locks. The wooden gates at the ends of the locks were washed out during the 1913 flood.
Akron’s Cascade Locks are a unique artifact left over from Ohio’s canal era—an era that began in 1825, and ended in 1913 in a catastrophic flood. They are the remains of a steep staircase of seven locks on the Ohio & Erie Canal that permitted canal boats to ascend 70 feet in less than half a mile to reach the Akron Summit—the highest point in on a canal more than three hundred miles long. The Cascade Locks were part of the canal system that transformed Ohio from a primitive wilderness into the third most populous state in the union.
Ohio’s canals were born at a time when the population was less than 300,000 in the entire state—about the population of Akron today. Most of these settlers lived in the southern part of the state along the river systems. To get their crops to market, some farmers built rafts and floated their wheat, corn, flour, oats, and salt pork down the Sciota, the Miami, and the Muskingum Rivers into the Ohio River, then down the Ohio into the Mississippi—sometimes all the way to New Orleans. But here in northeastern Ohio, the land was virtually uninhabited. It was still a forested wilderness.
Since Ohio’s few roads were little more than muddy trails, and since railroads wouldn’t get to this part of the country for almost half a century, the Ohio General Assembly proposed a system of canals—originally to encourage development of the northern part of the state. The goal was to connect Lake Erie with the Ohio River—not as a shortcut, but as an inland transportation system. Farmers settling in our part of the state would then be able to ship their crops to New York and other eastern markets by way of Lake Erie schooners and New York’s new, highly successful Erie Canal.
Construction of the Ohio & Erie Canal (called the “Ohio Canal” for short), began in 1825, and was completed from Lake Erie at Cleveland to Portsmouth on the Ohio River by 1832. The Ohio & Erie was the first, the longest (309 miles), and the busiest of a network of waterways that would become 813 miles of canals in Ohio. They became the Interstates of the day—albeit with a speed limit of four miles an hour to prevent the boats’ wake from washing out the clay banks.
The Ohio and Erie Canal, on the right, was the first and longest of Ohio's 813-mile canal system.
Freight boats had three cabins with two cargo in between. They were pulled by three mules in tandem, hitched to a single towline.
Because northern Ohio is hilly country, a system of locks would be needed to permit canal boats to crawl up out of one river valley and down into the next one. Locks would operate like hydraulic elevators, lifting a boat six to ten feet at a time as they were filled with upstream water—or lowering the boat to the downstream level by draining the lock. To operate a lock, the gates were closed by means of long, heavy handles called “sweeps." A “wicket” or “butterfly valve” was opened in an upper gate to fill the lock, lifting the boat to the upper level—or, if the boat was going the other way, the wicket in a lower gate would be opened to drain the lock to the downstream level of the canal.
Canal locks were 90 feet long and 15 feet wide, closed at each end by wooden "whaler
gates." "Wickets" or "butterfly valves" permitted
water to be let into the lock through the upper gate, or drained out through the
lower gates. The gates were opened and closed by means of long handles called "sweeps."
But because each of the Cascade Locks has the unusually large lift of ten feet, opening a butterfly valve in the upper gate high above a boat that was just beginning its ascent would shower down on any passengers or crew members who happened to be on deck. So each of the Cascade Locks had a covered two-foot-square opening below the waterline on the upstream side of the upper gate. When this “sluice gate” was opened, water entered an internal “sluiceway” within the lock wall, coming back out below the water line beside the boat—resulting in happier passengers and a dryer crew.
Sluiceway
opening in Lock 11
Akron is actually situated on the Continental Divide: The Cuyahoga River flows north from here into Lake Erie, out the St. Lawrence River and into the North Atlantic. The Tuscarawas River, south of the city, drains into the Ohio River, with the water eventually flowing down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico. Akron sits at the top—at the summit. To climb up the 395 feet from the level of Lake Erie to the Akron Summit between the Cuyahoga and the Tuscarawas River valleys, 44 locks would be built between Cleveland and Akron.
To ascend the last hundred feet from Lake Erie to the Akron Summit would require 15 locks in a single mile, 21 in a two-mile stretch—a cascade of locks. Realizing this would delay canal boat passengers and their crews half a day, Akron’s founder, Simon Perkins, successfully lobbied the Canal Commissioners to have this steep ascent occur on his (and Paul Williams’) property, knowing it would create a major town. He registered his town plat in Warren in 1825, calling it “Akron” (a Greek name for “high place”), gratuitously giving the state a canal right-of-way down the middle of his town map. He planned Akron’s town center at Main and Exchange next to Lock One, which is still the highest point on the Ohio & Erie Canal.
The really steep ascent began a mile south of Lock One between today’s Market Street and Memorial Parkway. The foot of this staircase of locks that is Cascade Locks Park begins at Lock 16, half a mile north of Mustill’s Store, ascending to Lock 10 at the top of the staircase. Here, the canal ducks under the innerbelt, traveling through a concrete tunnel that encloses several locks and coming out behind the Civic Theater in downtown Akron.
The trail in Cascade Locks Park is a link in a chain of towpath trails that will ultimately begin in Cleveland, winding south through the Cuyahoga Valley National Park for 21 miles before arriving at the Cascade Locks. The trail will continue through downtown Akron, Barberton, Clinton, Canal Fulton, and will ultimately be extended all the way to New Philadelphia within the Ohio & Erie National Heritage Canalway. Currently, the trail ends at the historic Mustill Store and House at Lock 15. June 2004 will mark the beginning of construction of the towpath trail section through the Cascade Locks. The ADA accessible trail will end temporarily at the innerbelt, but will be accessible from downtown Akron via a pedestrian link along Beech Street to Main Street, ending at the Lock 3 Live Amphitheatre.
Page 1 of 3, Next>>