In our first grade, Minnie Flinn took us over, I think it was about fifteen boys, or girls
and boys, and Mr. Avery let us get on the canal boat. And he took us down through the locks. He’d shut the south end gate,
and open the north end and let the water fill up, and then your boat went in on it. And
you’d open the lower one and shut the top one, and let your boat go down, and right
out.
Lockington was a tough place in the early days. They had a jail and
seven saloons in Lockington, because that was a junction where the canal boats came. They
come up north and they’d have places they could go off in a pond, and the boats could
get past them. The canal boats never traveled at night.
There was quite a business house at Newbern too. Newbern was one of the
busiest places in Shelby County. They had a little elevator there and a big supply house,
and they had a big platform built out where they’d unload. If I wanted to get
something from Cincinnati, I’d have it shipped to Newbern. There was a station there,
and a man that took care of that. There was a big platform there, as big as this house.
They’d unload it out of the canal boat and you’d have to go over there and pick
it up, just like you do on a train today. |
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Wasn’t that basin at Lockington used for working on boats?
Yeah. They had a little lock, a gate
on that, and you’d run the canal boat in on that. Then you’d shut the gate and
let the water out. Then you could get under there and work on that canal boat, underneath,
to caulk it. I’ve seen them caulk the boats. I remember when the canal boats went
through Sidney. They had a bridge they would raise up and let the canal boat go through,
then they’d let it back down.
Most of the biggest boats had four mules, right in line. There was a
man always walked with them, and ordered them. You could talk to them like you’d talk
to a person. They’d mind you. They changed teams every eight hours. They had a stable
on the boat. [If six mules,] three of them would be hitched up and pulling the boat, the
other three would be on the boat riding, and they’d feed them and take care of them.
Joe Avery was quite a canal man. And his wife. If you’ve seen a
picture of a canal boat, there was a rudder behind, where you steered it. I remember that
old lady moving that thing back and forth. He went from Port Jefferson to Dayton.
They’d put up at night. They had different docks along different ponds, where
they’d put up.
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About a dozen boats a day would pass. They were big; some bigger than others. They had a
state boat, the Ohio state boat. That was the boat that done all the repairing on the
canal. If anything went wrong, why, they was out there to repair it.
Remember the
turnbridge on Bunker Hill across the canal?
That was taken out shortly after the
Western Ohio was built, because they did away with the traffic on the canal. I remember
well, in Sidney, when they had the bridge that they lifted up. Had big weights on it, and
a man would turn a thing that would raise the highway up, and the canal boats would go
under, and they’d let it back down. That was right there close to where the Sexauer
bakery used to be.
Mrs. Rees: On the corner of the same square that the police station is in, there
used to be a great big red elevator there, and the canal went right past that, on the west
side of it. That’s all filled in now. There aren’t any houses there.
Mr. Rees: When they built the Western Ohio, that took a
lot of the canal business. They ran freight cars. That ’13 flood really cleaned out
about everything along the canal. You can’t believe what a distressed place Piqua was
after that flood. Business houses on Main Street, it just flooded and washed them out. It
came fast. |