For many years, boat horns and brawling packet crews echoed at this lock and the 142 others on the Ohio and Erie Canal, a 308-mile water toll road built between 1825 and 1832 from Lake Erie at Cleveland to the Ohio River at Portsmouth. The canal drove the early growth of Akron and Massillon, then declined with the rise of railroads, and the flood of 1913 destroyed its usefulness.