The Chuckery Runs — and Stops

AKRON & SUMMIT COUNTY

Karl H. Grismer,

Summit County Historical Society,

Akron, Ohio c. 1950 p 138-140

  

One of the Akronites who never spent much time fretting about the predicted doom's day was Dr. Crosby. All during the period when the Millerites were shouting the loudest he went steadily ahead working on his great Chuckery canal project.

Late in 1841, when money began coming in^. from stock sales, the doctor hired a large gang of laborers and started construction work. 'The men were paid $13 a month, $2 in cash and $11 in orders upon the company's store in the Stone Block at Market and Howard.

The job of constructing the 20-foot dam in the river near Prospect Avenue in Cuyahoga Falls was not too difficult but when Dr. Crosby started on the four-mile canal he had one set-back after another. Two miles of the waterway through the Gorge had to be cut from the solid rock of the overhanging cliff, or built up from the bed of the river with masonry and filled in with earth. The work was extremely tedious and dangerous.

After leaving the Gorge, the canal had to pass through high bluffs and over deep ravines. To have built up the canal bed over the ravines by ordinary means then available would have been prohibitively ex­pensive. Dr. Crosby ingeniously solved the problem by tapping the P. & 0. Canal a mile and a half away and using the water to wash down enough earth to fill the depressions. Millions of cubic yards of soil were moved in this manner.

The great construction job was finished in the spring of 1844, the canal being completed to a point on the west side of North Hill near the foot of the present Uhler Avenue.

Dr. Crosby proudly announced that the water would be turned on May 27th. Soon the world would have proof that his dream project had been well conceived—that enough water power could be generated to turn the wheels of countless manufactories. In no time Summit City would become a reality—the days when mockers called it the Chuckery would soon be over.

On the designated day a large crowd gathered at the end of the canal, where the water was to start plunging down to the valley below. Hour after hour the people waited. Word came from up the canal that the water had been turned on but that much of it was seeping through the porous canal bed.

Despite the leakage, however, the water came slowly on. And at last, at 4 p.m., it reached the end of the canal and began flowing over the hill, not in a mighty stream but enough to show that the plan was practical. The crowd cheered, again and again, and, said the Beacon two (lays later: "The 'Baby Waker' of the Summit Guards awakened the echoes in the valleys of the two rivers by repeated discharges."

Late in the afternoon the water was turned off at the dam so the porous portions of the canal bed could be puddled with clay, also to make gates and sluices needed for conducting the water into the Little Cuyahoga valley.

But the repairs and improvements were not even started. Never again did water run through Chuckery Race. Its lifespan was less than half a day.

The era of water power supremacy was nearing its close; the day of steam power was dawning. Sensing this, many stockholders refused to advance more money, figuring it was folly to invest further in a shaky enterprise. Others had lost confidence in the company manage­ment, charging that there had been "rascality" in handling its affairs. With its treasury empty, the company was forced to suspend all activities.

It was head over heels in debt and was soon swamped by law suits. It owed scores of firms and individuals, more than $200,000 altogether. Creditors demanded their money—and the company had no money to pay them. The court appointed a receiver and finally, on June 15, 1850, the properties, once valued at more than $400,000, were sold to the attorney for the bondholders for $38,172. There was talk for a while thereafter of reviving the project. But nothing was done. The Chuckery was dead.

Ruined financially and in health and spirit, Dr. Crosby stayed on in Akron for a few years and then moved to Wisconsin where he died in 1854 at the age of 75, a crushed, disheartened man. But the manu­facturing city of Akron, which his Cascade Mill Race had created, lived on—and flourished. The doctor had not dreamed in vain. He had just dreamed once too often.

Soon after the company failed, the mammoth dam in the Glens was washed away during a flood. Only the canal bed then remained to remind future generations of Dr. Crosby's great undertaking.

Unadventurous indeed was the Akron boy of later years who never "went exploring" through the Gorge and traced that ancient canal from its place of origin in the Glens, down past the Big Falls and along the valley to where it vanished in the sandy bluffs along North Hill. That was a trip which was a "must" with the coming of every spring. It was just as essential as the carving of one's initials on top of one of those smooth, flat rocks in front of Old Maid's Kitchen, across the river.

Few boys who tramped along that canal a half century or so ago ever learned anything about it in school—who built it, or why, or when. That may have been because the Akron public school system did not come into existence until three years after the Chuckery Race held water for the first and only time.