Warren County Canal

The Warren County Canal was a branch of the Miami and Erie Canal in southwestern Ohio about 20 miles (32 km) in length that connected the Warren County seat of Lebanon to the main canal at Middletown in the mid-19th century. Lebanon was at the crossroads of two major roads, the highway from Cincinnati to Columbus (later U.S. Route 42) and the road from Chillicothe to the College Township (Oxford), but Lebanon businessmen and civic leaders wanted better transportation facilities and successfully lobbied for their own canal, part of the canal fever of the first third of the 19th century. The Warren County Canal was never successful, operating less than a decade before the state abandoned it.

The Miami and Erie Canal was authorized by the Ohio General Assembly in 1825. Work began that same year and the canal was navigable from the Ohio River at Cincinnati to Middletown in December 1827. By April 1830, it was open to Dayton. (The entire length to Lake Erie at Toledo opened in 1845.) New York Governor DeWitt Clinton, who was the driving force behind his state's Erie Canal, came to Ohio in 1829 for the groundbreaking ceremonies of the Miami and Erie Canal, which were held in Middletown. On his trip to the Buckeye State, he visited Lebanon, staying at the Golden Lamb Inn. The village's inhabitants caught the "canal fever" of the day and demanded they too have access to the new waterway. The State quickly obliged.

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