Wabash & Erie Canal Notebooks describe and locate the great Indiana canal project on a county-by-county basis. Its task is to collect the available information about the canal in counties it passed from the state line through Lafayette. Although these Notebooks discuss the entire canal project, each of the three concentrates on the route and mechanical structures of the two or three counties of the greater canal. Included are the reports of canal officials, contracts for mechanical structures, diaries, recollections recorded and retold, local histories, state and county history periodicals, newspaper accounts of the day or as remembered in later years, archaeological findings, topography maps field observations and historical markers.
The series focuses on where the canal line was located as well as what can be observed today. Extant sites include remnants of mechanical structures, the channel and towpath levees that made the project possible, economic development influences and how the canal affects the lives of people to the present day.
Tom Castaldi
Allen County Historian
Fort Wayne, Indiana
** “Time has taken its toll and in some cases the roads I wrote about to reach a particular site or two now may have been bypassed with newer ones such as the Heartland Corridor.” – T. Castaldi
