Lunch at Tadmor - Day 38

  I got to eat lunch at one of my favorite places in Ohio today, Tadmor. What? you've never heard of it?

There's a welcoming sign at the village border- the same as you find at most places.

The "problem" is that everything you see in the photo above is gone. Tadmor was situated in an enviable position in the late 1800s. It was an important transportation hub. The Dayton & Michigan RR had been laid, adding another transportation route to the three it already boasted: the Miami-Erie Canal, the Great Miami River- plied by keelboats, and the National Road, which crossed the river on the covered bridge.

I haven't talked yet about the National Road. It was the first interstate highway, proposed to run from Cumberland, Maryland all the was to Vandalia, Illinois. It never made it quite that far, but the NCT crosses it twice in Ohio. The western crossing is here in Tadmor.

All that's left now of the covered bridge is an abutment.

Here are the remains of a sluice gate to let canal water drain to the river. The canal prism is visible behind it.

The locations of Post Office and Store were marked, but nothing remained.

These are the abutments for a bridge that spanned the canal which must have been behind the photographer who took the photo above.

The builing in the photo above is of the canal keeper's house.

So, what happened? You already know most of the story. As railroads took more business from the canals, the canals declined. But Tadmor had a rail line, right? But that 1913 flood really did in most of the state of Ohio and created havoc throughout the Northeast US. Almost all canal structures were damaged, and the rail bed was probably seriously undermined.

Look at this marker post that was located in Defiance. The blue line way up the pole (at arrow) was the height of the March 1913 flood. (1982 and 2005 are the lower marks) Four days of rain and snowmelt flooded most of the major rivers.

But there is one more piece of the story to tell. Why didn't Tadmore rebuild?

Soon after that flood, a series of dams, like the one from two days ago, were built on the great Miami River for flood control. The Taylorsville Dam is just downstream from Tadmore, and the National Road was routed across the top of the dam. No more canal for Tadmor, no more rail line. I'm sure the wooden buildings were gone. Keelboat traffic had all but ended, and then their "interstate" was re-routed.

So I ate lunch today with the "ghosts" at Tadmor, and pondered how important towns, and even great cities, disappear into the mud.

Miles today: 15.8. Total miles so far: 550.0

See Why We Can't Have Nice Things