Operation
The canal began operation in the summer of 1843. It only operated for about a decade before it became apparent that the canal was not economicially viable. Even when canal boats were operated at extremely slow speeds, the banks rapidly eroded, and the canal had to be constantly dredged to be operable. Terre Haute, Indiana, housed the headquarters of the canal from 1847 through 1876, when the canal lands were sold at an auction conducted by resident trustee Thomas Dowling at the Vigo County Court House.
The last canalboat on the Wabash Canal made its last docking in 1874 in Huntington, Indiana, but other sections shut down years earlier. In 1887, Paulding County, Ohio residents put the final nail in the canal system's coffin: unhappy with mosquitoes breeding in the stagnant waters of Six Mile Reservoir, they cut the dike and drained it in the Reservoir War. There were several other "reservoir wars" during the canal's colorful history over the same issue, including the Clay County Canal War in Indiana.
The right-of-way through Fort Wayne was purchased by the New York, Chicago and Lake Erie Railway (the Nickel Plate Road) which ran from Buffalo to Chicago. This allowed the railway to run straight through the heart of a major midwestern city without razing a single home. The canal right-of-way was also directly adjacent to downtown, which made the new railway quite convenient for passengers and many businesses. The canal from Napoleon to Toledo was paved over to make U.S. Route 24.
Read more about this topic: Wabash And Erie Canal
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.”
—Francis Bacon (1560–1626)
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)