While some in Akron celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with lively traditions — from wearing green to raising glasses of green beer — others recognize its deeper historical significance.
Long before the rubber factories, Irish immigrants dug the canal that made the city possible.
Many Irish immigrants first arrived in New York before moving west to Akron, where in the 1820s they helped dig Lock 2 and sections of the Ohio & Erie Canal, said David Lieberth, president of the Akron History Center.
Some dug the man-made waterway with picks and shovels. Others used their hands. Many were paid 30 cents and a ration of whiskey per day.
“And it was said, without the whiskey,” Lieberth said, “most of them would have stopped working.”
As the canal progressed, Irish immigrants and their families set up nearby shacks or shanties. The area became known as “Little Dublin” (now known as Howard and Furnace streets).
Building the canal brought hundreds of Irish laborers to Akron, and they “helped to shape the Akron we know today,” wrote Mary Plazo, a librarian with the Akron-Summit County Public Library, in 2007. “These early Irish immigrants inhabited much of North Akron and also created suburbs historically known as ‘Hell’s Half Acre,’ in the vicinity of Thornton, High, South and Washington Streets, and ‘Little Dublin,’ in the old Furnace St. district.”
In 1827, the Akron-Cleveland route opened. The first canal boat left Akron on July 3, arriving the following day in Cleveland “to great fanfare,” according to the Ohio & Erie Canalway’s historical timeline.
The canal transformed Akron, a small settlement, into a growing commercial hub. At the time, it was Ohio’s economic highway. Railroads didn’t dominate freight transport for at least another two decades.
Generations later, members of the Mark Heffernan Division #2 of the Ancient Order of Hibernians placed two memorials near the locks to honor the Irish immigrants whose labor helped build Akron.
“In building the canal many hardships confronted the laborers: contractors who encouraged fights among the workers to avoid paying them; loss of pay on rainy days but with charges for lodging; malaria; “canal fever”; cave-ins, and tuberculosis. In spite of all these difficulties, many immigrants and urban workers were willing to accept such jobs and ignored warnings from the Irish-American papers that urged them to shun canal and railroad work because they were ‘the ruin of thousands of our poor people’ who were considered ‘like slaves.'” – Irish immigration participation in the construction of the Erie Canal (1969)
