This is from my September 26 ride to Urbana, Ohio, about 7-8 miles from Fort Loramie. Upon looking at my Delorme StreetAtlas map, I noticed that about a mile and a half stretch of the old Miami and Erie canal is shown as a waterway that still exists. I didn’t know it at the time, so wasn’t looking for it. The best I can do now is look for it in the photos I took.
Here I stopped to get a photo of Dawson. The canal should have crossed the road somewhere between here and the railroad underpass that one can just barely see up ahead. Maps and my GPS record tell me that the canal should have been approximately where the road drops down, up ahead. But even when zooming in on the photo in its original resolution, I don’t see any sign of a waterway crossing under the road. Maybe there’s a culvert somewhere out of sight? And what’s that drain right by my bicycle? Does that have anything to do with it?
Here one can see the canal shown on Googlemap, even if it isn’t labelled with the name “Miami and Erie.”
This view is from the railroad underpass, looking back up the hill I had just ridden down. One can even see the “stop ahead” sign at the top of the hill. But I don’t see any sign of a waterway crossing the road along that hill. So the railroad displaced the canal in more ways than one.
Oh, well. This just gives me a reason to go back and do some more riding in Shelby County someday. I didn’t have canals as a major topic on my mind when I did this ride, but now that I see the marks on a map, I’d like to go back and look for marks on the actual landscape in other places where the existing roads cross what’s left of them.
