During the heyday of the Ohio & Erie Canal — built between 1825 and 1832 — using horses for work made the most sense. At a steady stride, a horse was able to pull almost 50 times as much weight through the canal as it could with a cart on a dirt road. To capitalize on this workflow, horses walked on paths along the canal, pulling boats along its waterways — until the Great Flood of 1913 left the canal abandoned. Travel back to this bygone era by boarding a draft horse-drawn boat tour — on a replica St. Helena III canal freighter — at the Canal Fulton Canalway Center. The replica’s predecessor, St. Helena II, was the first authentically built canal boat in the U.S. since the end of the Original Working Canal Era. On a nearly one-hour ride into the past, an onboard historian regales passengers with canal history as they pass through an original section of the canal.
Summit Memory / Akron-Summit County Public Library and Cascade Locks Park Association
