Southern Indiana Trails

vansville, Ind. — The Wabash & Erie Canal connected Lake Erie to the Ohio River. It was the longest canal constructed in North America, running for more than 460 miles. The canal project proved extremely important to the development of early Evansville, though the canal itself was ultimately a financial failure.  Canals are manmade channels that connect two larger waterways. Towpaths where constructed alongside the channels so that animals could pull the boats down the canals, which lacked the running waters to propel them. Like many Mid-western states, Indiana sought to emulate the success of the Erie Canal in upstate New York. The Erie Canal, completed in 1828, helped to connect the east coast to the interior of the county. Indiana State Legislature passed the “Indiana Mammoth Internal Improvement Act” in 1836. The Act would spend ten million dollars on infrastructure across the state, including the Wabash & Erie Canal. Early Evansville was chosen as the site whe...

A three-mile stream meandering through a park in Carroll County is all that remains of what was once the longest canal in the northern hemisphere. Inspired by George Washington’s idea that the eastern seaboard be linked to the country’s interior via a system of waterways, early Indiana leaders set about the construction of the  Wabash and Erie Canal . The project, buoyed by the success of New York ‘s Erie Canal, would provide a route to transport raw materials, manufactured goods, and people through the heavily forested state. In 1827, the federal government designated a corridor of riverside acreage for the canal. By 1832, a crew of largely Irish immigrants had begun construction in Fort Wayne –at the junction of the Wabash and Maumee Rivers. Over the next twenty years, they would clear a sixty-foot swath and dig a four-foot trench ultimately connecting Toledo, Ohio and Evansville, Indiana. At 468 miles upon completion, the Wabash and Erie Canal was part of the second-longest can...

In July 1835, rumors began circulating among construction supervisors along the route of the  Wabash and Erie Canal . On a section being dug near Lagro, Indiana, just east of the town of Wabash, the Irishmen working on the canal were said to be preparing for a fight. The workers were divided into two groups, based upon their region of origin in their homeland, and the so-called Corkonians and Fardowns, who had already engaged in fisticuffs and skirmishes, were apparently planning a battle which would involve about 300 men on each side of the conflict. The state’s canal commissioner, David Burr, used a brief period of truce to call up local militias—as fighting broke out, enough men were arrested to deter the remainder of the combatants. Battles among  Irish canal and railroad workers  in the 1830s and onward were common enough that they became the stuff of local legends. Fighting was usually explained by calling upon ethnic stereotypes of heavy-drinking, hot-headed I...

The Wabash and Eric Canal was started in 1832 in Fort Wayne. It reached Fountain County in 1846 and when completed in 1853 was the longest artificial waterway in the country. Transportation in the days before the canal was quite inadequate. The population of the state was growing and better transportation was badly needed to ship out the surplus farm produce and to bring in the much needed supplies for the pioneer families. The canal being close to the Wabash river and running through swamps and low lands, malaria became a problem and later cholera made its appearance. The work was done by Irish immigrants who had been forced out of Ireland by the potato famine. These laborers died by the hundreds, and the death rate was so high that the digging of graves was almost as big a job as digging the canal. The situation was to grow so terrible that for every six feet of completed channel it had cost the life of one human being. The laborers who died from the cholera in Fountain Coun...

In the 1830s, Indiana, like many other states, began to plan and build canals to transport goods and people. Like other projects, the Wabash and Erie Canal was begun with great expectations and at great cost. But by the beginning of the 1840s, the state was in dire financial condition and the Wabash and Erie was, for years, uncompleted. By 1850, work on southern sections of the canal had begun again, and high costs and difficult working conditions plagued the project. Immigrant laborers, mostly Irish, were brought in by contractors to perform the backbreaking work of digging and moving earth. The men were housed in poorly built shanties, some estimated to be eighty feet long with bunks for fifty or more men. To make the work slightly more bearable, “jigger bosses” walked up and down the lines with free whiskey doled out four times a day. During the evening hours, many men continued to drink in “doggerys,” shacks or flatboats which served alcohol, too often diluted with the polluted l...