The canal's river engineering: feeder dam, feeder canal, aqueduct

1832 — 1883

Replumbing the St. Joseph to float boats over the divide: The Wabash and Erie Canal was the largest river work of Fort Wayne's first century, and its trade belongs to the Exports section; its plumbing belongs here. Fort Wayne was the canal's summit — 790 feet above sea level, 198 feet above Lake Erie — and a summit level drinks water from both directions, so the canal had to be fed from a river. The commissioners' engineer John Smythe was hired to find the high point of the St. Joseph for a dam; Samuel Hanna and David Burr, with the surveyor Asa Moore, fixed the site about six miles north of town, near what became Robison Park. The dam, begun in 1832 and finished only in 1834 against repeated flood delays, was built of trees, sand, boulders, and gravel — 17 feet high and 230 feet across the river, at a recorded cost of $15,397 — impounding a lake to feed the summit.

From the dam a feeder canal ran down the west bank of the St. Joseph — its trench is still visible in Johnny Appleseed Park — crossed the Bloomingdale ground, and met the main channel at the summit near present Rumsey and Wheeler streets, the spot where ground for the whole canal had been broken on February 22, 1832. How long the feeder was is a small standing quarrel of the sources, printed here as found: about five miles in Fort Wayne in Canal Days, six and a half miles in the Canal Society's account, nine miles in ARCH's heritage-trail telling. West of the summit the canal crossed the St. Marys itself on a wooden aqueduct — contract let May 1, 1834, built by Henry Lotz, 204 feet long with a flume 17½ feet wide and 6 feet deep carrying 4½ feet of water (500 tons of it) at five miles an hour — a river, in effect, flown over a river on a bridge. The aqueduct stood until 1883. The canal it served was abandoned by 1874 in the News-Sentinel's retrospective and saw its last boat in 1882 in ARCH's; both dates stand in the record, and the feeder dam's lake drained back into an ordinary river.

Sources:

1. ARCH Fort Wayne, Heritage Trail: "Wabash and Erie Canal" — the summit and the "Summit City" nickname, Smythe's assignment, the Hanna–Burr dam site, and the nine-mile feeder figure.
2. The Wabash-Erie Canal (Raffety, 1916) in the Canal Society's The Tumble (January 2022) — the dam begun 1832, finished 1834, costing $15,397; the aqueduct contract of May 1, 1834, its 204-foot length and flume dimensions; the six-and-a-half-mile feeder.
3. Michael Hawfield, "Time ran out on canal era," News-Sentinel Cityscapes (September 12, 1994) — the dam's 17-foot height and 230-foot width, the feeder trench in Johnny Appleseed Park, the summit figures, and the 1874 abandonment.
4. Fort Wayne in Canal Days (Indiana Historical Society) — the groundbreaking site at the feeder junction and the five-mile feeder figure.