Canal Fever: The Ohio & Erie Canal, from Waterway to Canalway

ch17. Journey to Canalway

Chapter 17 Journey to Canalway peg฀bobel฀and฀lynn฀metzger This chapter continues the story of the old Ohio & Erie Canal, as the eVort to preserve it changed from a grassroots, local initiative to a wellcoordinated drive toward national recognition. Canal fever was intense, and the advocates were focused and determined to both develop the corridor and achieve the national designation. Success was in the air. When Congressman Ralph Regula (R-Ohio) announced in 1993 that he was drafting legislation “to have the 87-mile corridor from Cleveland to Zoar dedicated as the nation’s fourth National Heritage Corridor, making it an aYliated area of the National Park System,” the grassroots organizations throughout the proposed heritage corridor sharpened their focus toward one goal: passage of federal legislation to create a national heritage corridor .1 A Route to Prosperity, the suitability/feasibility study that evaluated the resources in the Ohio & Erie Canal corridor for possible national designation, was released in 1993, and by 1994 both major nonprofit organizations , the Ohio & Erie Canalway Coalition (OECC) and the Ohio Canal Corridor (OCC), had hired executive directors, set up oYces, and were evolving toward more professional organizations.2 Working alongside National Park Service (NPS) employees and Ralph Regula and his staV, they rallied support for national designation. In 1993, only three other areas in the United States had been designated as national heritage corridors: the Illinois and Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor (1984) in Illinois, the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor (1986) in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and the Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor (1988) in ฀ 335 336฀ peg฀bobel฀&฀lynn฀metzger Pennsylvania. This type of aYliated area was new to the National Park Service, and its attitudes and opinions about such areas varied widely. When the planners in the National Park Service’s Rivers, Trails, and Conservation Assistance Program were researching and drafting the Ohio & Erie study, they decided to convene a roundtable discussion in Cleveland, among people who had experience with heritage corridors. The National Park Service had been studying “heritage areas” and had reached the point of proposing legislation to create a national program, giving such places a definite position in the National Park System, rather than treating each one individually, under separate legislation. As Rory Robinson, one of the National Park Service planners, explained, in the process of that study, groups across the nation wanted to learn more about heritage areas and how to have their region recognized as one.3 This roundtable discussion marked perhaps the first time that such a diverse group of individuals with diVerent heritage-area interests sat down together for a frank discussion about what was working, what was not, and what should be done. Two distinct opinions from within the park service were expressed and are still debated today. The first claimed adding heritage areas to the National Park System was a “thinning of the blood,” diluting attention and funding from already stretched-to-thelimit budgets. The second, shared by proponents of the Ohio & Erie Canal project, argued that an oYcial program would be an eYcient way “for the park service to extend its philosophy and mission without taking over direct management and having to find the resources to do it.”4 Reflecting this uncertainty within the National Park Service, The Route to Prosperity found that “the Ohio & Erie Canal Corridor is eligible as a National Heritage Corridor, an aYliated area of the National Park System.” Then, referring to draft legislation under consideration in Congress at that time to create a defined program for heritage areas, it also concluded “the Ohio & Erie Canal Corridor is both suitable and feasible for designation as a component of the potential National Heritage Partnership system.”5 (To date, there is still no legislated heritage areas system within the National Park Service, and heritage areas continue to be created by separate laws.)6 In November 1993, Congressman Regula introduced the first bill (H.R. 3593) to create the Ohio & Erie Canal National Heritage Corridor. John Debo, superintendent of Cuyahoga Valley National Park, recalled intense meetings during the lead-up to that bill. Key players were Regula and his aide Barbara Wainman; Rory Robinson from the Rivers, Trails, and Conservation Assistance Program; Dan Rice, executive director of journey฀to฀canalway฀ 337 the OECC; Tim Donovan, executive director of the OCC; and Debo from Cuyahoga Valley National Park. It was a period of significant collaboration , with drafts of the bill flowing back and forth between...