In the late 1810s, Ohio Governor Ethan Allen Brown recognized the importance of canals for transporting people and supplies over long distances and persuaded the Ohio Legislature to create a canal system. The Ohio Canal Commission Bill passed in 1822, and the commission hired engineer James Geddes to find the quickest and best route connecting the Ohio River and Lake Erie. On July 4, 1825, Ohio Governor Jeremiah Morrow and New York Governor DeWitt Clinton broke ground at Licking Summit just north of Newark, and the project began on July 21, 1825. The Miami and Erie Canal combined three canals. Its original southern segment, called the Miami Canal, was planned from Middletown south of the Ohio River and was completed in 1828. Three years later, the Miami Extension connected Dayton to Troy. After political arguments, the Ohio Legislature agreed to extend the canal to Ohio’s northern border as the Wabash Canal. Loramie Summit, the canal’s highest point, stood 395 feet above Lake Erie and 513 feet above the Ohio River, and it was the point from which canal locks were numbered north and south. The canal took twenty years to complete, stretching 250 miles across western Ohio through fourteen counties at a cost of $8,062,680. It included 105 canal locks, nineteen aqueducts, and three guard locks. Its first boat was the Governor Brown, named for Ethan Brown. Boats were pulled by horses or donkeys walking along the canal’s sides, and canal workers earned either thirty cents a day or eight dollars a month. Twenty years after the canal was finished, it was abandoned because railroads were quicker to build and faster for travel across the state. Ottoville was established between Locks Twenty Seven and Twenty Eight in 1845 because the locks and canal required a local town to keep them in working condition. Ottoville was in Section Sixteen, and towns such as Ottoville and Delphos owed their existence to the once popular canal when it opened in 1845.