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1835 — 1843
A wheat field without a road is a pantry; with one, it is a business: The first section of the Wabash and Erie Canal, from Fort Wayne to Huntington, opened on 4 July 1835, and through traffic followed as the Ohio works were finished. In 1843 the Ohio portion of the canal was completed to Maumee Bay, freight and passenger traffic was scheduled through from Toledo to Lafayette, and the canal was formally dedicated at Fort Wayne on 4 July 1843, with Senator Lewis Cass delivering the leading address. The effect on outward trade was immediate and structural. Before the canal, the surplus of the Maumee and upper Wabash country — wheat that rotted, pork that walked to market on the hoof or did not go at all — had no cheap road to the eastern markets where it was worth money. After 1843 it did: east down the Maumee to Toledo and Lake Erie, or southwest down the Wabash. Warehouses and mills rose along the Fort Wayne canal front from Calhoun to Lafayette streets, packet lines organized (Samuel Doyle and William Dickey ran eleven boats and a steam propeller; D. F. Comparet operated six boats and two steamers), and the freight tariff the canal commissioners set in 1843 shows what the road was for: flour, pork, lard, bacon and meats were rated at 7½ mills per mile per thousand pounds for the first hundred miles, corn and the coarse grains at 3 mills — the produce of the farms priced first, because the produce of the farms was the cargo.
Sources:
- The Wabash-Erie Canal (ACPL copy, Internet Archive) — the 1835 opening to Huntington, the 1843 completion to Maumee Bay and the Fort Wayne dedication of 4 July 1843, and the commerce along the canal front.
- B. J. Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Indiana, Vol. I (1917) — the packet lines of Doyle & Dickey and Comparet, and the canal freight rates established in 1843.