Canals made Ohio in the early 19th century the way railroads would later make the West. Water routes from Lake Erie to the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico made it possible for towns and cities to spring up from frontier forests as freight and, by extension, wealth began circulating through the state. Most of those canals are long gone, but their ruins still dot the Ohio landscape in many places, including the remnants of a lock at the imaginatively named Lockville Park in the town of Carroll. It’s pretty…
