Welcome
Cascade Locks
Looking southwest from the North Street bridge, the grassy plain in the foreground (with a high-voltage tower in the middle of it) was the site of a large basin in front of Ferdinand Schumacher’s Cascade Mill—which was located where the grove of trees now stands.
Schumacher's
Cascade Mills was located where this grove of trees now stands at the
corner of North Street and Howard. The grassy plain in the foreground was
a wide basin.
Cereal
entrepreneur Ferdinand Schumacher
Schumacher was a German immigrant who introduced rolled oats to the Ohio community in the 1850s in a small oatmeal plant on North Howard Street . But in 1961, his first major customer became the Union Army—a stroke of luck that launched his career as a nationally-known cereal entrepreneur. He built his Empire Barley Mill and two German Mills (the first one destroyed by fire), before he purchased and refurbished the Cascade Mills at the intersection of Howard and North Streets, a flour mill utilizing state-of-the-art water power. When completed in 1876, the mill was turned by an iron water wheel 36 feet in diameter, having a ten-foot face and weighing 37 tons. The metal wheel stuck up above the ground about 18 feet, inside a semicircular housing—one that appears next to the 1876 photo of the newly refurbished mill.
Farmers
unload their wheat at Schumacher's new Cascade Mills
This ornate brick tower in the picture was a “standpipe” in which water rose like a siphon to fill the 48 iron buckets of the wheel. For this was an overshot wheel, meaning it was not pushed at the bottom by the force of the water in the Cascade Race, which ran through a tunnel more than thirty feet below (which tunnel Schumacher used as a supplementary outlet for the water wheel’s tail race). It was the apex of the giant water wheel that had to be fed through a large closed pipe from a much higher altitude. The source of this water was a dam in the Cascade Race like the one near the top of the hill that is climbed by the Cascade Locks—a concrete dam with two spillways that have a kind of “hydraulic box” between them.
A
concrete dam between Locks 10 and 11. The 48-inch opening, fitting
bell and spigot clay pipe may have been the source of the water that after
flowing underground for nearly half a mile, rose up in the standpipe of
Schumacher's Cascade Mills to power a 36-foot diameter overshot water wheel.
This dam backs up a millpond that is contained by a low concrete wall that runs alongside the foot path. The hydraulic box has a 48-inch outlet on the downhill side that would fit large-diameter, bell-and-spigot clay pipe—a product developed in Akron the 1860s (which for a time made the city the “sewer pipe capital of the world”). Inside the concrete box is a diagonal line of long steel bolts that probably held a screen or grill to keep debris out of the pipe. Although some believe this dam may have belonged to another industry, it was probably just such a hydraulic structure that fed Schumacher’s giant water wheel.
Indeed, in describing Schumacher’s Cascade Mill, William Perrin’s History of Summit County (1881), states that “The water supply flows through a 6-foot [sic] subterranean tube, to an iron standpipe [inside the brick tower], rising about 18 feet to the level of the basin and flowing from an iron tank 26 feet long, 8 feet wide and 4 1/2 feet high, to the iron gate, which gauges and delivers it to the buckets at the apex of the wheel.” It was the weight of this water filling 48 buckets each revolution that turned the wheel, delivering all the power necessary to run Schumacher’s mill through a heavy leather belt 40 inches wide and 120 feet long.
But despite his dedication to state-of-the-art waterpower, Schumacher’s prescience is apparent in the tall smokestack that appears in photographs a decade later at the north end of the mill. Recognizing the advancing age of steam, Schumacher supplemented—indeed dwarfed—the output of his giant waterwheel with a modern steam-generating powerhouse. There is a very practical reason his decision, dictated by the laws of physics: The energy liberated by one ton of water falling one mile is about the same as that released by burning one pound of coal. The Cascade Mills burned in 1904, exposing the giant water wheel, which stood silently in the ruins for two decades before it was finally dismantled.
Canal
boats loading flour in the basin in front of Cascade Mills in the 1880s. Supplementing
his waterpower, the mill now has a tall smokestack to generate steam.
Just north of the Cascade Mills site is a railroad trestle—the older and lower of the two railroad bridges in the valley. About 300 feet long, this one spans the canal and the towpath at Lock 13, and is about 40 feet above the top of the lock. It is the second trestle built on the site. The first was the crude-looking wooden structure seen in 19th-century photographs of the valley. According to Ohio railroad icon, author, and history professor Dr. Roger Grant, the wooden trestle was constructed by the Valley Line Railroad in 1879-80. This line went bankrupt in 1895, but was reorganized as the Cleveland Terminal & Valley Company, the same year. The Baltimore & Ohio took control of the line in 1909. It is this trestle that is crossed by today’s Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad, from which riders can get an aerial view of the Cascade Locks.
Behind the ruins of the water wheel is the original wooden trestle constructed
by the Valley Line in 1879-80.
The
Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad crosses the lower trestle, providing an
aerial view of the Cascade Locks.
A second, much higher trestle soars 70 feet above Lock 11. Erected in 1926 by the American Bridge Company, the lofty steel structure soars 70 feet above Lock 11 and is nearly 900 feet long. It is a thrill to watch a massive, thousand-ton freight train serenely gliding eight stories in the air over the fragile-looking steel structure—a marvel of then-relatively-new structural engineering design; i.e., the ability to daringly calculate the strength of materials (as first demonstrated by such 19th century pioneers as James B. Eads and John Roebling, who left St. Louis’s Eads Bridge, New York’s Brooklyn Bridge, and Cincinnati’s Great Suspension Bridge in their wake). Beneath this light steel webbing , still standing like ancient monuments, are the massive stone piers that supported the first trestle on this sight, erected in 1890-91 by the Pittsburgh, Akron & Western Railroad.
The
valley's upper trestle, built in 1926 soars 70 feet above Lock 11.
Beneath
the steel webbing of the upper trestle stand the stone piers from the first
trestle over this site, built in 1890-91 by the Pittsburgh, Akron & Western
Railroad.
Between the two trestles is the Ace Rubber Company, which stands on a historic piece of land that was the site of several industries. The first was Aetna Furnace, one of five cupola furnaces built along the Cascade Race during the first decade the canal was opened. The iron foundry burned down twice and was rebuilt the second time as a flour mill known as Aetna Mills—another of the grist mill in the industrial valley that operated on waterpower (until it, too, converted to steam in 1881).
Aetna
Mills, another grist mill in the industrial valley that operated on waterpower
until converting to steam in 1881.
At the summit of the Cascade Locks, a coal-fired power house was built in 1888 to furnish direct-current electric power for the new electric streetcars that had begun replacing the city’s horse cars Not long thereafter, the traction company began selling electric power to the city. But during the 1913 flood, after a winter of record snowfall, the dam at the outlet of the Portage Lakes gave way (or was deliberately breached by local residents to prevent flooding of their property) and thousands of cubic feet of water headed down the canal toward Akron. To prevent flooding of the Goodrich boilers and adjacent buildings, the lock gates at Lock One were dynamited, releasing a wall of water that roared on down the canal, washing out all the subsequent gates in the locks below.
When the torrent reached the Cascade Locks, the traction company’s powerhouse boilers were inundated and downtown Akron was plunged into darkness. The Akron Beacon Journal had taken sensational pictures of flood damage throughout the city and had one of the greatest stories in its history, but could not go to press because it had no power. Resourcefully, one staff member brought in a motorcycle, attached a drive belt from the rear wheel to a small dynamo, and got one Linotype machine running. An undersize edition was composed, and the cast plates were taken to Saalfield Printing in East Akron. The book publisher had its own power plant, permitting the paper to publish the story, with spectacular pictures of the flood that ended the life of the Cascade Locks—and of the Ohio & Erie Canal—forever.
The 1913 flood ended the life of the Cascade Locks and of the Ohio & Erie
Canal.
<<Back, Page 3 of 3