The Wabash & Erie Canal extended 468 miles from Toledo, Ohio, to Evansville, Indiana, creating a continuous waterway that connected the Eastern Seaboard through Lake Erie to the Gulf of Mexico. A Congressional land grant on March 2, 1827, made possible the construction of a 168-mile canal from the mouth of Ohio’s Auglaize River on the Maumee River across the watershed divide at Fort Wayne, Indiana, to the mouth of the Tippecanoe on the Wabash River. Construction began at Fort Wayne on July 4, 1832, reached Delphi through Carroll County by 1840, and, with two additional land grants, grew into a 468-mile route through the Wabash Valley wilderness. By 1853 canal boats were navigating between Lake Erie at Toledo and Evansville on the Ohio River, helping develop Indiana and points west, but the canal was ordered closed by court order in 1874 and sold in 1876. Canal boats traveled on narrow level stretches of water between a towpath and a berm bank, and locks at either end of these stretches raised or lowered boats with changes in elevation. At Lock No. 32, whose 90-foot by 15-foot chamber once occupied the present side ditch, a lockkeeper stationed at Meutzer Tavern oversaw two sets of hand-operated wooden gates with wickets that let water enter or leave the lock, and boats took several minutes to make the 9-foot change in elevation as lines of canal boats often waited to pass on their way to and from Paragon.