Published: September 11, 2007 10:02 pm         

641 construction pauses for preservation of historic timbers from Wabash and Erie Canal

Timbers ‘incredibly intact,’ under about two-feet of silt

TERRE HAUTE — A wooden platform used to support a stone culvert along Indiana’s Wabash and Erie Canal about 157 years ago will be removed to build a bridge over the Little Honey Creek for the state’s 641 bypass.

Hand-hewed timbers, ranging in length from 20 to 40 feet, often measuring 14 inches square, were discovered early this year during construction of the bypass.

“The timber is incredibly intact and were under about two feet of silt,” said Alice Roberts, principle investigator for Gray & Pape Inc., a Cincinnati, Ohio-based cultural resource management firm, which has a statewide contract with the Indiana Department of Transportation to document historical finds.

There are 56 timbers under the Little Honey Creek on McDaniel Road, about a quarter of a mile north of Gross Drive. About 70 feet of intact timbers were found, with another 40 feet containing no timbers. Then another 10 or so timbers were discovered.

“A culvert bed was usually about 120 feet long. This is the first culvert bed to be excavated,” said Don Burden, architectural historian for Gray & Pape and a member of the White Water Canal Trail Inc.

The timbers, along with several shims, will be numbered, then reassembled and placed on display by the Whitewater Canal Trail Inc. near Metamora, about 30 miles northwest of Cincinnati. The timbers will be held in a shallow pond to keep them from rotting.

“It is a great learning tool and will show people how these culverts were built,” Burden said.

A canal culvert, often consisting of stone arches, was designed to carry the canal bed on top, much like a modern-day bridge carrying a road over a creek bed. Also on top of the culvert was the canal towpath, where a mule walked and pulled a boat through the canal, and an earthen berm. A creek or river flowed underneath through the arch of the culvert.

To support the culvert, a wooden platform was built of heavy timbers.

“Essentially you couldn’t just set the stone in the dirt or it would fall over. You had to build a wooden raft more or less to spread out the weight, to distribute the weight over a wider area. You would build your stone structure on top of it so it would all stay level,” Burden said.

Sandstone was used to make the culvert arch. It was “hammer-dressed stone. They used what they called a bush hammer and they could level out the stone. The hammer makes marks like a ball-peen hammer was used to make the stone smooth or nice detailed edges,” Burden said.

The canal was open to Terre Haute by 1847. This culvert was built around 1850, Burden said.

Some timbers for the base platform are 20 inches wide, Burden said, which means very large white oak trees were used. “So the trees would have been felled about 1850 for this culvert and the trees already were 300 or more years old. This is old timber,” he said.

Charlie Gannon, project manager for Walsh Construction Co. of Chicago, which is building the second phase of the bypass, said the timbers were found when wood timbers were pile-driven into the ground prior to heavy steel beams.

The timbers were to be pushed 12 to 14 feet in the ground; however, timbers were found just two feet below the creek bottom.

“They [wood pilings] starting bouncing, so we knew we had hit something,” Gannon said. The company then notified the Indiana Department of Transportation.

Don Thornton, engineer for INDOT, said the discovery of the timbers delayed construction of the bridge, but did not delay the project. “It should not have a significant impact” on the overall project, he said.

The delay was in obtaining permits from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources to damn the Little Honey Creek. That work began on Friday. The timbers are expected to be removed by the end of this week.

Chris Koeppel, administrator of the cultural resources center for INDOT, said the state’s environmental impact report for the bypass had one line stating the culvert was in the general area and may be discovered if earth is removed deep enough.

Koeppel said once the timbers were discovered, the state knew exactly which culvert had been discovered because of historical engineering documents. It is culvert No. 151.

Construction on the Wabash and Erie Canal in Indiana began in February 1832 in Fort Wayne. The state of Ohio built the canal at the same time westward toward Toledo. The canal by 1847 was open to Terre Haute and by 1853 was open to Evansville.

The canal was largely built by Irish and German immigrants and many died of yellow fever and other mosquito-borne infections, Burden said. The canal was 468 miles in length, the longest in the nation.

Burden said the canal south of Terre Haute proved problematic and was largely the portion that resulted in the state going into bankruptcy over canals. Navigation south of Terre Haute ended in late 1861. The canal north of Terre Haute survived until January 1874, Burden said.

Short sections of the canal remained navigable into the early 1880s, he said.

Howard Greninger can be reached at (812) 231-4204 or howard.greninger@tribstar.com.