By C. Goodyear (author of President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier) 

Cleveland, Ohio, thrummed with commerce in the summer of 1890. Its population of 261,000 had nearly tripled in just twenty years. Some locals were older than most of the city’s buildings, and the sounds they heard daily represented nothing less than the heartbeat of a still-industrializing Midwest. “Mammoth” factories clanged loudly, and trains trundled along tracks that cut through the city. The dockworks along Lake Erie were packed keel-to-keel with fishing boats and steamships bound for New York, Michigan, and Canada.  

 Ships along Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, circa 1890. 

But wander down the coast, pivot a bit inland, and soon a pedestrian would find themselves in another setting entirely. Paved roads gradually soften into dirt pathways. Brick buildings slump into small farmhouses. Eventually the farmhouses give way to wheat fields lined by fences, hickory groves, and thick copses of copper-red maple trees.  

Running across this bucolic landscape was a small channel of water. Slender wooden boats drifted along its course at no more than a few miles an hour. Cleveland was yet only a short distance away, but – by appearances – the scene now belonged to an earlier, simpler period of American history.  

The reality, though, was even more dramatic. The pedestrian hadn’t stepped back in time, but rather cut to the industrial bedrock that had enabled Cleveland’s growth into cityhood – the Ohio Canal, one of the most important infrastructure projects in early American history.  

***** 

The Ohio Canal’s creation, expansion, and industrial heyday transcended the lives of several presidents. Its planning began in earnest during the Monroe Administration. Its full completion took place nearly a decade later, amid Andrew Johnson’s presidency. Its operations persisted into the 20th century.  

But one of our nation’s executives possessed a uniquely strong claim to the canal: the waterway played a key role in the inspirational, tragic life of James Garfield, our twentieth president. It is not for nothing that one of the first biographies of Garfield was titled “From Canal Boy to President.” The connection even transcended generations. James Garfield’s father, Abram, had been one of the thousands of workmen who built the Ohio Canal in the early 19th century. 

Theirs was, as canal historian Terry Woods phrased it, “not a pleasant occupation even at the best of times.” The planned pathway of the canal practically bisected the Buckeye State, running from Lake Erie to the Ohio River – crossing hundreds of miles of hills and swamps, valleys, and forests. It was an ambitious dream that would require years of arduous toil to bring into reality. 

First came what was called “grubbing.” This entailed clearing a planned canal section of ground vegetation.  Such work took place primarily in winter (when treesap would be frozen and therefore couldn’t gum up ax-blades). Lingering stumps would then be hauled out of the thawed ground by oxen in the spring, before the actual digging proceeded through to midsummer. Then the builders would briefly put their tools aside – not out of a need for rest, but rather because seasonal diseases like malaria and cholera would decimate their ranks by late July.  

So, in summary, the ordeals involved with being a workman building the Ohio Canal do not need to be imagined. As one wrote, “I am cold, wet, and sleepy…my head aches so that I am almost insensible to everything around me.” 

But they persevered, in the pioneer tradition, and so by 1827 significant swathes of the canal were open for business – ferrying a steadily growing trickle of commerce, people, and cargo deeper into the Midwestern frontier.  

A canal boat pulled by two horses in 1902. 

***** 

Alas – and in the style of many major infrastructure initiatives, before and since – the actual work of building the Ohio Canal was not as fiscally responsible as first imagined. The state amassed considerable debt to fund construction and then piled on more as cost overruns built up and traffic levels disappointed. Contractors went bust trying to dig through clay-clogged soil and clear surprisingly dense forests. 

This was the fate which befell Abram Garfield. After a stint as a superintendent on the canal, he won a contract to build several further sections of it – a venture which fared poorly for him. “A sudden rise in prices” bankrupted Abram, forcing him to move his family to a homestead in a rougher part of northern Ohio.  “We sank a good deal in the Canal,” his wife, Eliza, would later recall in an accidental pun.   

A new son, James, would soon join their family. The new arrival was destined to be the last American president born in a log cabin – in good part, because of the canal his father had helped build, and the development it enabled across Ohio and the deeper Midwest. 

***** 

The Ohio Canal was destined to play a remarkably prominent role in James Garfield’s political life. One could even argue it helped make his ascent to the White House possible.  

In 1848, an adolescent Garfield ran away from home to spend a season working on a canal boat. His time aboard would pass in the soft hues of adolescent summer; the boat Garfield joined, The Evening Star, spent several weeks hauling stone coal, copper ore, and wood to various depots along the canalway. It was a formative period in the young man’s life – one which ended after he narrowly escaped drowning (an ordeal which gave him the convenient epiphany “that God saved me for something greater than canaling”).  

This turned out to be correct. A literally perfect political career would follow and, throughout it, Garfield’s time on the Ohio Canal provided excellent campaign material.  

From Civil War battlefields, to the Supreme Court, to the halls of Congress, Garfield’s acquaintances, allies, and voters would tell stories about how one of the most prominent American statesmen of Reconstruction had started his professional life “working a tow path” on the old Ohio Canal. It added a compelling element of rustic antebellum romance to his life story, one which only gained appeal as the industrialization of American picked up in the latter half of the 19th century. 

Cover of 1881 book by Horatio Alger, Jr.  

This narrative hit its full stride roughly three decades after Garfield worked the canal – when he ran for the White House. Campaign floats shaped like canal boats cruised down city avenues; Republican poetry drew on predictable imagery (“With Garfield at the helm! All hands aboard! No laggards now!”); one enterprising company issued “Tow Path Fine Cut” chewing tobacco, the tin bearing an image of a young Garfield traipsing along the canal bank. 

Nor did the imagery lose its significance once Garfield won the White House. As president-elect, with his inauguration approaching, he had a nightmare about being caught on a canal boat in a storm.  

It was a grim portent of events to come. A gunman’s ambush at a Washington, D.C. railroad station, would bring Garfield’s life to a tragic close only a few months into his presidency. 

The canal also had a bleak fate. In 1913, a devastating flood (“Ohio’s greatest weather disaster”) struck, levelling much of the waterway. But by then the canal had already passed its prime…and, arguably, fulfilled its purpose; Ohio had completed its transition from a frontier territory to one of the most important states in the Union.  

Sources 

• “Some residents were…”; James Garfield to Corydon Fuller, January 5th, 1856. James Garfield Papers – Library of Congress. 
• “Mammoth”…city”; Samuel Peter Orth, History of Cleveland, pages 15, 79 
• “Handsome brick buildings…”, Albion Tourgee, Figs and Thistles, page 19.  
• “Hickory…trees.” Hendrik Booraem, Road To Respectability, page 15.  
• “small channel of water” Terry K. Woods, Ohio’s Grand Canal, page 20.  
• “no more than a few miles” Hendrik Booraem, Road to Respectability, page 68.  
• “Its planning began…” Terry K. Woods, Ohio’s Grand Canal, pages 16, 20, 52.  
• “It is not for nothing…” Horatio Alger, From Canal Boy to President.  
• “Not a pleasant…the Buckeye State.” Terry K. Woods, Ohio’s Grand Canal, image insert and pages 4, 12.  
• “Grubbing.” Charles Huntington, History of the Ohio Canals, page 24.  
• “primarily in the winter…like malaria and cholera” Terry K. Woods, Ohio’s Grand Canal, pages 13, 19. 
• “I am cold, wet…” Terry K. Woods, Ohio’s Grand Canal, page 12. 
• “The state amassed considerable debt…soil,” Charles Huntington, History of the Ohio Canals, page 25, 65-67. 
• “Surprisingly dense” Terry K. Woods, Ohio’s Grand Canal, Page 13.  
• “A sudden rise in prices,” J.M.Bundy, The Life of Gen. James A. Garfield, page 6. 
• “We sank” C.W. Goodyear, President Garfield: From Radical To Unifier, page 21. 
• “In 1848” C.W. Goodyear, President Garfield: From Radical To Unifier. 
• The lyrics of “Garfield at the Helm” can be found in the James Garfield Papers of the Library of Congress. 
• “Tow Path Fine Cut,” National Parks Historic Site – Mentor Place “As president-elect.”
• Allan Peskin, Garfield, page 680. 
• Place, “A gunman’s ambush.”
• Candace Millard, Destiny of the Republic, page 152. 
• “Ohio’s greatest weather disaster” Terry K. Woods, Ohio’s Grand Canal, page 70. 
• U.S. Census Department decennial census.

This article is a part of our series From Lighthouses to Electric Chargers: A Presidential Series on Transportation Innovations