Gloves, trash bags, buckets, and poles with grabbers assisted volunteers during this summer’s cleanup.
Shannon Bohle | The Lima News
DELPHOS — For roughly 20 years, the Delphos Canal Commission has hosted bi-annual cleanups of what remains of the Miami and Erie Canal in Allen County.
Cleanup started Saturday in the Canal Parking Lot behind the museum and continued for several hours as volunteers walked north from Third St. to Lock 24 in Stadium Park.
There was a strong turnout of volunteers from Lakeview Farms; Commission members Lou Hohman, Dave Desenberg, Brian Buettner and Tom Jettinghoff; and other committed community members, including Chuck Shumaker and others.
Canal cleanup clears the waterway and its grassy banks from debris for the upcoming Delphos Optimist’s annual Fourth of July fishing derby, which will be held from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. in Stadium Park for kids ages 2 to 14. Cleanup also aids downtown beautification, supports local wildlife and helps to preserve the canal.
Plastic items and drink containers — including bottles, cups, and pop cans — were among the most common litter types collected Saturday. People used to dump many kinds of items into the Canal, said Bob Ebbeskotte, Delphos Canal Commission Board trustee. “But now there’s more of an awareness and an appreciation of the Canal, so there’s not quite as much of that.”
The Commission was formed in 1988 with a mission to acquire and preserve materials relating to the history of the Miami and Erie Canal as well as the history of Delphos and surrounding areas.
“The canal is a huge part of our history, so we try to take care of and maintain it,” Ebbeskotte said. “The Miami and Erie Canal, which runs from Toledo to Cincinnati, was started in Middletown around the middle 1820s and came through here in the 1840s, and it opened for traffic around 1845. Back in the 1840s, there was no way to get what you produced to market. Once the canal was open, it was possible to ship grain, pork, lumber and timber, opening up markets in northwest Ohio to the rest of the world.”
Ebbeskotte explained that as boats traveled north, they reached Lake Erie and then traveled through the Erie Canal, floating down the Hudson River to New York’s seaboard ports. From the New York ports, Ohio’s goods could be loaded onto large ships capable of crossing the Atlantic. A logbook in the museum shows that lumber was among Delphos’s earliest primary exports, as its forests were cleared to create farmland and build the town’s earliest structures.
