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Canal commissioner of Indiana · Of Jackson County
On the record
David Burr of Jackson County stands in the canal record at the very beginning: Fort Wayne in Canal Days dates the first serious consideration of the canal idea to a conversation about 1825 between Judge Samuel Hanna and Burr, and the first board of canal commissioners seated Hanna, Burr, and a Mr. Jones. In 1827 Burr joined Hanna on the survey of the feeder canal with the surveyor John Smythe; in the Wabash and Erie Canal Association's telling, Burr collapsed from exhaustion on the work and Smythe died of fever. Burr is not to be identified, on any source checked for this record, with David H. Burr the cartographer of New York and Utah; the identification is an open question, and this profile prints only what the canal record itself supports.
Find them on this page
- § 06 — people of the record
Sources: Slocum & Robertson, History of the Maumee River Basin (1905); History Center and Wabash and Erie Canal Association, feeder-survey account; Fort Wayne in Canal Days (ACPL).