Ohio’s Grand Canal concisely details the entire history of the canal system. Author Terry K. Woods chronicles the events leading up to construction, as well as public opinion of the canal system, the modifications made to traditional boat designs, the leasing of the waterways to private companies, and the canals’ legal abandonment in 1929. He also includes a personal look at the 1913 flood through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boatman who experienced it firsthand. Well written and thoroughly researched, this single-volume history of the Ohio & Erie Canal will be important to educators and to a general audience interested in Ohio history and canals.

The people who lived and worked on and alongside the Ohio & Erie Canal had a vocabulary all their own. Now listed for the first time in one source are the terms they used to describe the boats, crews, and canals. Newspaper and magazine articles about the construction and operation of Ohio’s canal system reveal a terminology filled with conflicting definitions. Engineers, crew members, and citizens each had their own jargons. To clear up the confusion, Terry K. Woods provides a dictionary of primary terms selected from those most frequently used in the official reports of the Ohio Canal Commissioners and the Board of Public Works. He also includes secondary terms taken from his interviews with ex-boatmen in the late 1960s and early 1970s and from his more than 25 years of research on the canals.

Combining original essays based on the past, present, and future of the Ohio & Erie Canal, Canal Fever showcases the research and writing of the best and most knowledgeable canal historians, archaeologists, and enthusiasts. Each contributor brings his or her expertise to tell the canal’s story in three parts: the canal era—the creation of the canal and its importance to Ohio’s early growth; the canal’s decline—the decades when the canal was merely a ditch and path in backyards all over northeast Ohio; and finally the rediscovery of this old transportation system and its transformation into a popular recreational resource, the Ohio & Erie Canalway.

This book s a profusely illustrated interpretation of life along Ohio’s nineteenth-century canal system: the Miami & Erie Canal in the western part of the state, and the Ohio & Erie Canal with its multiple feeders in central and eastern Ohio. An introduction by George W. Knepper, professor of history at The University of Akron and president of The Ohio Historical Society, places the state’s canal system in national historic perspective and addresses such issues as the importance of the Ohio canal system in the state’s economy and industrial development; the interrelationship between the Industrial Revolution in Ohio and the changing uses of canals; and the impact of the canal system on contemporary social and ethnic issues.

This three-part series won awards from the International Film & TV Festival of New York, the Ohio Association of Historical Societies and Museums, and the American Association of Historical Societies and Museums. A 16-page Teacher/Discussion Guide is included. This series, produced in cooperation with the Canal Society of America, brings to life an almost forgotten period in Ohio’s early history, visiting restored sections of the vital nineteenth-century inland transportation system. Kent State University Press’s award-winning book A Photo Album of Ohio’s Canal Era, 1825–1913, by Jack Gieck, can be purchased along with this DVD.