Chapter 6: The Lines on Ohio’s Map

The living are judged by their personalities — the dead by the record of their accomplishments. And many of the achievements of the settlers of Cleveland entitle them to an illuminated page in American history. By 1834 they had cut a canal from Cleveland to Portsmouth.

This canal is 309 miles long. One has but to compare it with the longest canals in the world to appreciate the labors of the Ohio canal builders. The Erie canal extends like a silver ribbon across the Empire State for 363 miles. The Ganges canal in India is a royal water-passage of 350 miles. The Grand canal in China, a thousand years in the building, goes 800 miles through the Celestial Empire. Many famous canals are less than one-half the length of the Ohio canal.

Alfred Kelley, the fist chief executive of Cleveland, promoted its canals. He was appointed state canal commissioner but provided with insufficient funds. No one had faith enough in undertaking even to expect to see the system completed. The state gave Kelley permission to make the cut and the people extended their good wishes. Kelley became a martyr to the cause of canals. He divested himself of personal comfort. With his family, he occupied a hut along the line of the first canal to keep a determined eye on the construction.

In 1820, Cleveland was a tiny lake port with less than two hundred inhabitants. Sandusky and Ashtabula were its serious rivals. Had destiny used Alfred Kelley, who lived, loved and labored for Cleveland, in some other vineyard, the city’s present position might be less auspicious.

Kelley was inspired by the successful completion of the Erie canal under the direction of Governor De Witt Clinton of New York. He foresaw that a canal from the interior of the state to Cleveland would make this lake port the shipping market of the Ohio basin. On July 4, 1824, there was a celebration of the beginning of work on the Ohio canal. The Governor of New York, of the long line of great Clintons, broke the ground. In 1834, a water route from Cleveland to Portsmouth was realized and the trip was made in eighty hours.

The passenger boats, known as “packets,” were drawn by three horses, single file, with a boy driver mounted on the rear steed. The passengers dined, slept, conversed or wrote letters in a cabin-hall, each according to his inclination or power of concentration.

Seymour Dunbar is authority for the statement that on one occasion one hundred men were crowded into a room designed for the accommodation of forty-two. There was a separate compartment for women and children. The division was maintained even during the serving of meals.

The maintenance of good nature in traveling on a canal packet was the test of one’s spirit of democracy. A man who removed his shoes before retiring in the packet berth was considered a “fop” and unnecessarily fastidious.

The crew of a canal boat consisted of a commanding captain, two hard-working steersmen, two juvenile drivers and the cooks. While the other members of the crew had rest periods, it is said that the cook “worked all the time.” Canal boat traveling had much to commend it to those of a lackadaisical temperament. Canal passage was safe. Dunbar poetizes this mode of travel:

“No more delightful experience of travel could be experienced in all the country than that encountered by a canal boat passenger while moving through a region of wooded hills during the hours of a moonlit summer night. Ahead he could see the plodding horses and their driver. The lights from the open windows gleamed on the towpath and the rugged hillsides, and each new turn of the waterway brought into vision some new scene of shadowy loveliness.”

The popularity of canal traffic was attested by the fact that more than nineteen thousand passengers arrived in Cleveland by canal in 1843. And so Alfred Kelley’s vision was vindicated. Like Alfred of old, surnamed “the Great,” he proved his case. “Going to Cleveland” was early made the vogue through the agency of the canal boat, despite considerable discomfort and low bridge hazards. Thus was Cleveland’s shopping district given initial impetus.

The canal boats brought wool, flour, wheat and coal to Cleveland. One barge brought a cargo of coal in 1828. There was a vain endeavor to market it about the town. Wood was plentiful. Why should one soil his jacket and soot the chimney of his house with this black stuff? At last Philo Scovill, mine host of the Franklin Tavern, was induced to burn it in his bar-room grate. Men and dogs soon gathered about to bask in the continuous and unvarying warmth. And
thus Old King Coal persuaded the people to allow him to become the servant of all.

Alfred Kelley was the James J. Hill of the first half-century of Cleveland’s commercial development. Mr. Hill once said, “I have written my name in lines of steel across the face of the continent and no man can erase it.” Alfred Kelley wrote his signature on the map of Ohio.

After the completion of the Ohio canal he turned his intense energy to railroad building. Kelley was first, last and all of the time for Cleveland. He knew that if the canals benefited Cleveland, the railroads were certain to do a thousandfold more.

The Ohio Railroad of 1836, not of Kelley’s promotion, was built on piles driven into the ground — the “railroad on stilts.” But this enterprise proved a bubble and brought nothing to the investors. For many years a portion of the track stood on Lorain Avenue.

Kelley organized the Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati Railroad on an entirely different basis than that of the unstable Ohio Railroad. Kelley knew one lesson by heart. He knew that to build and operate a railroad, one must have ample capital. A meeting was held in the old Empire Hall. Kelley made a speech. The citizens saw the light, but lacked warmth over the enterprise. Then Kelley dramatically locked the doors and changed his appeal to a demand. The session lasted till the “wee sma’ hours” and the funds were raised in a generous amount.

Construction had, some time before, been started on the Scranton flats of the Cuyahoga River. Kelley himself filled the first wheelbarrow with earth — every shovelful a symbol of progress. Other men followed his example. After the Empire Hall subscription meeting, the Cuyahoga Steam Furnace Company built the first engine. It was a wood-burning iron horse which wheezed and coughed itself nearly to pieces. But it drew a string of flat cars on the construction work with speed and regularity.

The newspapers of rival towns had directed shafts of satire at Cleveland’s “wheelbarrow railroad.” The “Cleveland Herald,” however, on February 20, 1851, silenced them all with this barrage:

“There is no use attempting an editorial today. The eloquent, sublime and fine all have vanished from our caput and their places are filled with one extremely large, spluttering, whizzing locomotive.”

An advertisement in the Cleveland papers announced, “The regular through trains of the Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati Railroad will commence running on Tuesday next.” A minister of the time used as his text, “The chariots rage in the street, they jostle one another in the broadways; the appearance of them is like torches, they run like lightning.”

Rails for Cleveland’s first steam road were brought from abroad. Today Cleveland is sending steel railway supplies to the Old World. Railroad regulation is one of the leading topics before the Nation for 1920. Cleveland’s first going railroad was regulated with a drastic indifference to the company’s plans. The Council passed an ordinance which limited the speed of trains in the city limits to five miles an hour. Trains were not permitted to run at night. Trains
were stopped to collect fares. Those who unofficially objected to the railroads placed obstructions on the tracks.

The first railroad eastward from Cleveland was the Cleveland-Painesville-Ashtabula, which started operation in November, 1851. This road was financed with difficulty. Investors believed that it could not compete successfully with the lake steamers. Provision was made for double-trackway and a good road-bed. Today this bit of railroad is a most important fraction of one of America’s greatest railway systems.

The journey to Buffalo from Cleveland was interrupted by a change at Erie to another short line. The various short lines were of different gauge, and through transportation was impossible. Cleveland men planned a consolidation of the many small lines, which resulted in the Lake Shore Railroad. Eventually the Lake Shore became a through line from Chicago to Buffalo. One trunk line after another made Cleveland a central point.

Alfred Kelley, crowned by his associates as “the railroad king,” was one of the Empire builders to whose memory time has been unkind.

Nor was he an idol of his own day generation. He was of the Cromwellian type. He did his work and made no bid for applause. But to him belongs the credit for the canal and railroad development of Ohio.

Cleveland became a bridge builder to avoid being “a house divided against itself.” The narrow valley of the Cuyahoga is a deep slash made by nature, which runs through the heart of the city. And were it not for the twenty-one bridges to “make us one” there would be twin cities watching each other across the divide.

Moses Cleaveland located his dream city on the eastern bank of the Cuyahoga. Later the settlement on the west side became known as “Ohio City,” Lorenzo Carter established a ferry for travelers who crossed the river near his tavern. A neighbor, Elijah Gunn, operated a ferry at the foot of Superior Street.

No bridge was possible at this point but near the present Central viaduct a bridge of logs, bound together by chains, was floated. This portable bridge had to be drawn aside to accommodate passing sail-boats. In 1811, a public meeting was held to raise money by subscription to build a substantial bridge. Thirteen persons agreed to pay in work and money the cost of this public utility.

The first wooden bridge across the Cuyahoga, with a draw of forty-nine feet as a passage way for vessels, caused a miniature war — “the battle of the bridge.” The Ohio City merchants objected to their trade going to Cleveland. Its city council declared the bridge “a public nuisance.” An official organized a raid and blasted one abutment of the bridge.

William Case of Cleveland, backed by a company of militia armed with muskets and an ancient cannon, waited on the bridge to meet the attacking party. The Ohio City stalwarts advancing with axes and crowbars, ripped up the floor of the bridge and Case was driven back with clubs and stones. A number were injured before the sheriff of the county exercised his authority.

But the bridge spanning the Cuyahoga created mutual interests. And many wooden bridges were erected. In 1857, a wooden bridge at West Third Street collapsed under the weight of a drove of cattle.

Zenas King, a youthful farmer and bridge builder, recognized the weakness of the wooden bridges. King built a number of bridges of iron girders. He was the inventor of the iron bridge adopted in railroad construction. King had the co-operation of Amasa Stone, railroad engineer and contractor. Bridges made on the King plan have been shipped and re-assembled in every part of the world.

To demonstrate its supremacy as a bridge builder, Cleveland has erected one of the largest concrete spans in the world. The high level bridge is five hundred and forty feet long. It is the masterpiece of the King Bridge Company. Four million dollars were here expended on the high level structure to save the laborious and unnecessary travel down to the flats and across the small bridges over the river and up the hills. As graceful as the arch of a rainbow, it typifies for all time the unity, co-operation and strength of Cleveland and of the old community of the Western Reserve.