Buckeye Lake--the Water Around

The state park website lists this as an 18' boat ramp...still think that'd be challenging

When I set out to do some photos of Buckeye Lake for the blog, I was hit by a problem--there is a LOT of ground to cover. I spent about 5 hours in the area, cruising the roads and parks around the lake. I found the Licking Summit I'd read about, and found myself wanting to take my wife back to Millersport for a meal in a neat restaurant by the canal.

It felt a little weird, in the middle of this small town taking pictures of the canal...but worth it

Fact is, the canal ran through this area for a reason--plenty of water already nearby, and water breeds human activity. The Licking River and numerous tributaries were here before the canal or Licking Reservoir was created. All around the lake wherever I stopped there were small streams either flowing into or out of Buckeye Lake, the most prominent of which are the old canals themselves.

This feels like it's not that different from how things were in the 1850's or so

Now, in a previous post I blindly discovered (because I don't look at easily-accessible maps until well after I'm home, because I'm a twit) the north end of the canal, and that doesn't exactly run into the lake any more. There's the spillway there, and that is a project that came long after the canal was defunct. The SOUTH end of the Ohio and Erie, however, does still flow into the lake in a navigable way.

I'm even willing to bet there were advertisements to lure passengers off the canal boats and into town

This led Millersport to invest in a long stretch of docks where boaters can cruise in from the lake, tie up their vessels, and partake in various trade here in town without having to pull their boat out. Easy to hop up for lunch at Hometown Hot Dogs, grab a case of root beer at the Circle K, then cruise back onto the lake for the evening.

I think it's a safe bet this has never seen a canal boat

In other spots, you had a careful balance of people leveraging nature for their own benefit, while still preserving the wetland. At Brooks Park, for instance, a fairly sizable yet shallow stream flows in from the surrounding fields. As it approaches the lake, it deepens--I suspect it was dredged a wee bit at one point based on the drastic depth difference, but I could be wrong--and a picturesque home with retaining walls holding back the yard sits across from a boat ramp.

I love the retaining wall ringing the yard, across from the stones on the opposite shore

One of my trips out to the lake I ran into a man who explained the modern evolution of the lake as a series of coves that had been dug out of the surrounding farm land, flooded, then connected by channel to the main lake so people can get their boats out. Looking at some of these small developments, and the jagged coastline of the lake, that makes a lot of sense to me. Buckeye Lake is really a testament to what makes humans both so incredible and so awful--we will find a way to make nature give us what we want.

Today, just like 180 years ago, you can follow this canal into the lake

Millersport Canals

So you built canals up and down both sides of the state at ridiculous cost but incredible benefit. Then the fad is over--no one is shipping their products by boat anymore, since they can do it far more efficiently (that is, a lot cheaper) on the railroads that sprang up like so many weeds after the civil war.

Canal providing the buffer between front yards and the road

It also doesn't help that a catastrophic flood essentially wrecked the surprisingly delicate canal system. I mean, it's one thing to keep using that 72" CRT television because you forked over six weeks pay for it in 2003--it's actually kind of insane to fork over another six weeks pay in 2015 to fix it. When you're already losing money, it's not a very difficult decision: do the bare minimum to clear the water way and shut it down for good, or pour millions into repairing locks and dams and aqueducts.

A Clue: if they had decided to repair the Ohio and Erie Canal chances are no one would have put driveways across it.

So they shut them down. Then what? What'd they do? There are a lot of reasons why you can't just leave long tracts of standing water about the country side. Mosquitoes comes first to mind, followed children falling in and drowning. In many places the canals were simply filled in, especially where the canals ran through towns or near spots where someone could use the land.

Canal as we might have seen it 100 years ago--narrow angle

In other places the canal right of ways became rail right of ways. That's pretty evident in my last post, where you had the other end of this canal as part of a rail-to-trail initiative. Pretty frequently, rail lines paralleled or used the canal beds since they'd already done the blasting and digging. It just made sense when you consider that freight and passengers using the railroad would still need to go where the canals had gone.

When the road arrived, it was only natural to follow the canal. The canal already knew where to go

In some places, however, you see the canals left intact. Up in Summit County, there's actually a section of the Ohio and Erie that's maintained as an industrial water supply. There's a big chunk of the old canal corridor up in Northeast Ohio that's being preserved as a National Landmark, actually--the Summit County Engineer has a quick guide to the Scenic Byways if you're ever up that way.

Using water from the canal to feed the stock ponds at the fish hatchery next door

Near Buckeye Lake things are far less grandiose, but still a fantastic preservation of what was. The waterway here appears to feed irrigation canals and streams where it terminates near the Hebron Freshwater Fish Hatchery. Part of the reason they keep the canal around in this spot is to feed that hatchery and the wetlands surrounding it

Another, similar view of the canal as we might have seen it--wider angle

You can see three sets of transport infrastructure from three different eras in this stretch--the modern road, the discontinued rail line, and the canal. It's a neat little Venn diagram of space and time, and if this were a video blog I'd probably do some weird overlay thing to emphasize the passing of time from one mode of transport to the next.

But it's not, and special effects are not my thing. All I can do is provide the information, the current view, and hope the telepathy between writer and reader works.