At Deep Cut on the Miami and Erie Canal, the canal’s greatest excavation was made through a tough blue-clay ridge separating the St. Marys and Auglaize watersheds. This huge ditch, 6,600 feet long and 5 to 52 feet deep, was dug and blasted by strong-muscled farm boys, brawny Irishmen, and sometimes convicts sentenced to hard labor, who worked from sun-up to sun-down with picks, shovels, and barrows for 30 cents a day while living in shabby, unsanitary camps plagued by malaria, other diseases, and frequent brawls. Spencer Township in Allen County and nearby Spencerville were named for Colonel William Spencer of the State Board of Public Works, which oversaw Ohio’s canal system. The canal later carried bustling traffic here, with mules on the towpath and packet and cargo boats passing by. Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York and Governor Jeremiah Morrow of Ohio removed the first earth for the canal on July 21, 1825, just below Middletown, and by 1845 boats were traveling the 249-mile route from Cincinnati to Toledo. Along the way, boats were raised to the Loramie Summit, 512 feet above the Ohio River, then lowered 395 feet to Lake Erie level by means of 108 stone and wooden locks, supported by 3 large reservoirs and many river dams to maintain a constant water supply. At its height, 400 boats used the canal, providing badly needed transportation for Ohio, powering hundreds of mills and factories at the locks, and helping transform the surrounding country from wilderness into an agricultural paradise, before railroads ended this profitable era by the early 1900’s.