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AKRON WAS BORN IN 1825 with
the building of the Ohio Canal.
The surveyors found, as the
Indians had before them, that the easiest way to get from Lake Erie to the Ohio
River was to follow the two river valleys and cross over at the narrowest point.
That was at Akron, where only eight miles separated them.
The red men left the Cuyahoga
valley five miles from town, followed a ridge high enough to be safe from am
bush, reached the summit at West Market Street and Portage Path, where the
Indian statue now stands. The elevation there was 1,100 feet, the highest in
Akron, and second highest point in Ohio. It was an exhausting climb however for
men burdened with canoes and tepees.
The surveyors did not worry
about a steep climb. They looked for the lowest elevation since that meant fewer
locks. So the canal route followed the main Cuyahoga valley to the edge of town,
then went several miles up the Little Cuyahoga to the edge of the downtown
district. There it climbed the steep sides of the valley with a series of locks
like stair steps, and reached the summit at Ex change Street, a stone’s throw
from the Mayflower Hotel and the Goodrich factory. The elevation there was only
960 feet, 150 feet lower than the Indian portage.
Once at the top, the canal
could stop for breath. The seven-mile level lay ahead, and it would be that far
before it would need another lock, out in the Portage Lakes district near the
headwaters of the Tuscarawas.
This route took the canal
directly through the present business district paralleling Main Street, the
city’s major business thoroughfare. Lock Nine is back of the Portage Hotel, Lock
Five behind the big bank building. Lock One is at the summit at Exchange Street,
the other locks being numbered north and south from there across the state.
Water will not run uphill, but
the Ohio Canal, starting at an elevation of 575 feet above sea-level at Lake
Erie, had to climb 395 feet in the first thirty miles. However, it made 200 feet
of that climb in the two-mile stretch through Akron, using as many locks getting
across the town as it did coming up from Cleveland.
It was the locks rather than
the canal which really made Akron. Anything that stops the movement of transportation creates a business opportunity at that point. A canal boat stop is
longer than others. A boat moves into the lock, waits while the sluice gates
close behind it, waits again while the water rises to the elevation of the next
section when the gates ahead are opened. Each lock stopped traffic, but
twenty-one stops in two miles meant that it would take a canal boat at least six
hours to pass through Akron.
A blind man could see that a
town would grow up there. No passenger is going to sit on the deck all that time
if there is anything to be done ashore. A town built there could collect a toll
from every passenger who came through. Once the canals were in operation,
horse-drawn carriages would meet the boats at Lock One and Lock Twenty-one,
whisk the passengers to the Empire House or the Cascade, where they could spend
half a day buying, selling, trading, eating, drinking, or having a game of cards
in the back room before it was time to overtake the boat at the far side of
town.
But there was no town.
Settlers were pouring in from New England by this time, all but decimating some
Connecticut towns, but they had not come to Akron. Middle- bury, two miles away,
was a town of 400 people, had four grist mills, a blast furnace, two sawmills,
several inns, half a dozen stores. It was on the stage coach line from Warren,
which ran along the crest of the divide, continued down Exchange Street near
Lock One and on up Perkins Hill, where a second tavern had gone up over looking
the whole section where John Brown of Harper’s Ferry lived later.
The rest of the present city
was almost entirely wilder ness. A few hardy pioneers, scattered over thousands
of acres, lived in log cabins chinked with clay, cooked corn meal and hominy,
johnnycake and wild game in big copper or cast iron kettles hanging in the
fireplace, made their own clothes out of deerskin, planted corn, carried their
grain in to the grist mills at Middlebury, where they bought calico at a dollar
a yard, or could get whisky for a dollar a gallon—though the storekeepers
usually kept a bottle on the counter for their customers.
The canal would change all
that; create a town in this unfavorable location. But a town had to be built.
Three men started the town; a general, a judge and a doctor. All were born in
Connecticut; General Simon Perkins at Lisbon in 1771, Dr. Eliakim Crosby at
Litchfield in 1779 and Judge Leicester King near Hartford in 1789. They were men
of great force and foresight.
Dr. Crosby had gone west as a
young man, studied medicine in Buffalo, practiced in Canada, but returned to
serve in the United States Army in the War of 1812, forfeiting his Canadian
property by so doing. He was forty- one years old when he came to Middlebury in
1820. There he found things more interesting than dispensing pills and
delivering babies. He put his little black bag away and went into business.
The town sawmill was not going
too well, so he bought it and made money on it. Then he bought the blast furnace
and started making plows. After that he moved three-quarters of a mile upstream,
where the Goodyear plant now is, threw a bigger dam across the river and built a
two-story grist mill, the largest in the section. Everything he touched
prospered.
Judge King, who lived at
Warren, had come west in 1817. A strong character and a natural leader, he would
serve four years in the Ohio senate, seven years on the bench, be nominated for
vice president of the United States on the anti-slavery ticket, though
withdrawing in favor of Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts. He sent his sons
to college at Trinity and Harvard, saw one of them married to a grand-niece of
George Washington. Another son married Dr. Crosby’s third daughter, and
curiously enough the Judge himself, later on in life as a widower, would marry
her sister, Calista, widow of the Charles Howard for whom Howard Street was
named.
General Perkins we have
already met. He was forty-six at this time, the leading citizen of Warren and
looked like a prosperous English country squire.
He mounted his hone one
morning in 1825 for a fifty- mile ride west. Word had come in that the canal
survey ors were driving their stakes squarely across his property, the despised
1,000 acres he had picked up eighteen years earlier for the taxes; for four
dollars and one cent, to be exact.
He thought the situation
through carefully on the way over. The canal would bring in settlers, homes,
stores. Everyone who built a home on his land, every baby who was born there
would enhance the value of the rest of his property. He could hold up the state
for a fancy price for the right-of-way, or he could donate the land, persuade
his neighbors to do likewise, give the undertaking every possible assistance.
On his arrival he looked up
two men who also owned property along the route. Paul Williams, who had come out
to Middlebury with Major Spicer in 1810, got the point quickly and agreed to
donate his land, but Charles Brown, a carpenter from North Stonington,
Connecticut, could not see it.
“It’s all right for you to
give away your land,” he said. “You’re a rich man and can afford it. I can’t.
The state will have to pay me a fair price for any property it gets from me.
“You’ll get your money back,”
said Perkins. “The canal will make the rest of your property that much more
valuable.”
“That could be a long time
off,” said the carpenter. “If you feel so generous, why don’t you buy my land?
Then you can do whatever you want to with it.”
Perkins reflected.
“I don’t want to buy, but I
might trade,” he said. “I own forty-five acres in the Little Cuyahoga valley, or
I’ve got 100 acres farther out, or for that matter, there’s a 300-acre tract
over in the next county.”
“I’ll take the forty-five
acres close in,” said Brown.
The next thing was to lay out
the town. Not many men have had the experience of owning a large tract of land
where circumstances make it certain that many people will soon want to live.
General Perkins laid out the
town around Lock One, where the stage coach line crossed, planned a business
section in the center, and 300 residential lots surrounding
it. He included a town square
a hundred yards away such as he was familiar with in New England.
The square is still there, a
rather drab and smoky park, with a comfort station on it and Perkins School and
the Childrens’ Hospital facing it, but none of Akron’s present citizens think of
it as the center of the city. Later generations forgot all about city centers in
the New England sense, but did have the grace to call this block Perkins Square.
General Perkins wondered about
a name for the town he proposed to build. Remembering its topography he fell
back on his Greek, and decided on Akron, meaning a high place.
Some years later when Akron
found itself on the high road of the nation, and hard-drinking, smooth-talking
gamblers, and light-fingered gentry in beaver hats and velvet breeches rode the
canal boats, taking toll of the unwary, inspiring Sam’l Lane to start a
newspaper to crusade against the scalawags, a friend twitted the General with a
classical pun.
“In naming your town Akron,”
he said, “did you not mean Acheron, a river in Hell?”
It was late in December, 1825,
before General Perkins had completed his plans, filed the townsite plat at
Rayenna, county seat of Portage County, in which Akron then lay.
A city was born.
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