The Ohio & Erie Canal: A Glossary of Terms

The people who lives and worked on and alongside the Ohio & Erie Canal had a vocabulary all their own. Now listed for the first time in one source are the terms they used to describe the boats, crews, and canals. Newspaper and magazine articles about the construction and operation of Ohio's canal system reveal a terminology filled with conflicting definitions. Engineers, crew members, and citizens each had their own jargons. To clear up the confusion, Terri K. Woods provides a dictionary of primary terms mainly selected from those most frequently used in the official reports of the Ohio Canal Commissioners and the Board of Public Works. He also includes secondary terms taken from his interviews with ex-boatmen in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Serious students of Ohio's canal era and canal buffs alike will find the definitions compiled in this glossary interesting and helpful in their readings and studies of the Ohio & Erie Canal system.