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  • From Waterway to RailwayThe History of the Cincinnati & Whitewater Canal
  • Stanley Hedeen (bio)

In his book Cincinnati in 1841, Charles Cist reported that the Cincinnati & Whitewater Canal was being built west to Indiana’s Whitewater Canal while Ohio’s Miami Canal was already operating from Cincinnati north to Piqua. Cist predicted great success for the Cincinnati & Whitewater, estimating that its cost of construction would be collected through tolls within seven years of the canal’s completion. He also forecasted a profitable future for Cincinnati’s first railway, the Little Miami Railroad being constructed from the Queen City north to Springfield.1

During the decade following 1841, the Cincinnati & Whitewater was finished, the Miami Canal was extended to Toledo and renamed the Miami & Erie, and Cincinnati secured a second railway with the completion of the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton Railroad. Cist, in his Sketches and Statistics of Cincinnati in 1851, disagreed with predictions that competition from the growing railways would depress trade on the canals. He wrote, “Our railroad facilities have not, thus far, nor are they ever expected to reduce materially, or even relatively, the canal business of Cincinnati and vicinity.”2

In the 1850s, Cincinnati became the eastern terminus for the Ohio & Mississippi and Indianapolis & Cincinnati Railroads. The regional expansion of train traffic was reflected in Cist’s Sketches and Statistics of Cincinnati in 1859, in which he devoted several pages to railroads but none to canals. Cist declared that among “all modern inventions, the Railway is, for purposes of commerce, the most useful, and the one that has the most influence on the destiny of interior towns.”3

The shift of commerce from canals to neighboring railroads occurred throughout the United States, even along the route of New York’s celebrated Erie Canal. Steam engines propelled trains at a velocity at least five times faster than the speed of a canalboat towed by draft animals. Locomotives also handled grades without the delays caused by canal locks and operated through winters when ice dams blocked canalboat traffic. Railroad competition commonly was the reason for a canal’s demise, but the Cincinnati & Whitewater was an exception in that its insolvency resulted from flood damages. Trains appeared in the geographic area served by the canal only after the towpath and channel of the failed waterway were converted into track beds. This article traces the unique history of the Cincinnati & Whitewater Canal from its conception to its repurposing as a rail corridor.4 [End Page 3]

In 1821, when the Whitewater River valley held about one-fourth of Indiana’s population, visitor George Ogden noted that the valley’s farmers produced “wheat, weighing from 65 to 68 lbs. per bushel, and corn, rye, oats, &c. in as great abundance as in any part of the world, and tobacco equal to any in Virginia or Kentucky.” Surplus crops, along with whiskey and wood, were primarily exported over rutted wagon roads leading to Cincinnati, and hogs and cattle were herded over the same routes. The farm and forest products were either sold in Cincinnati or placed on Ohio River boats traveling to other markets. In return, salt, iron, and various articles of merchandise were laboriously hauled from Cincinnati landings and markets into the Whitewater Valley. Mail and passengers in carriages and stages also traveled back and forth over the ill-maintained Indiana and Ohio roads.5

Immediately east of the Whitewater Valley, residents of Ohio’s Great Miami and Mill Creek Valleys shipped many of their items on the Miami Canal after it opened in 1828. They found transportation to be more efficient and therefore less costly via canalboat than wagon. The Miami Canal’s success motivated southeastern Indiana citizens to step up their demands for a Whitewater Valley canal, a waterway they had repeatedly proposed since the early 1820s. In 1834, the Indiana legislature finally responded by authorizing a survey of a canal route from “Wayne county, thence down the valley of White Water, leaving the same at the most convenient point, as to terminate at Lawrenceburg in Dearborn county, on the Ohio river.”6

The survey, completed by the end of 1834, located the Whitewater Canal on a 76-mile line...

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