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Village History I It was about 200 years ago that Mad Anthony Wayne dragged his heavy
equipment from Defiance along the Maumee River to fight the Battle of In 1822 Thomas Howard, a Revolutionary War veteran, came by boat across Lake Erie from the East to the head of the rapids. He became the first settler of our village. His family walked through the woods of both Pennsylvania and Ohio to join him here. Others came, too, and the town of Gilead was plotted in 1833.
In 1838 Irish and German immigrants began digging the Miami and Erie
The canal system had a series of locks. Ours was lock No. 9. Some work was done on this canal during the WPA and the CCC days of the depression years of the 30's. One project was the building of what we call Bluebell Island. Across the river the Toledo Metroparks have restored the local part of the canal. The sidecut has recently been cleaned by the village of Grand Rapids and the state of Ohio.
Grand Rapids in the first part of this century must have been a busy, active town. It was easy to get to Toledo by railroad. Ladies Aids and Sunday School classes were part of the social scene. Literary and cultural groups, as well as card clubs, were established. The Masonic Lodge, Eastern Stars, Loyal Order of Moose, and Rebekahs, with all of their subsidiaries, were important organizations in town. |
Fallen Timbers. It was this battle that led to treaties with the
Indians. That made it possible for Ohio to become a state in
1803. In 1814, in the War of 1812 with the English, General
William Henry Harrison, later to become president of the United States,
led his troops to defeat the English and their Indian allies.
Tecumseh, a very important Seneca Indian chief, fought in this battle.
Another major participant was an army engineer named Wood who designed
much of the fort. Our county is named after this engineer.
Before Thomas Howard arrived, Peter Manor, a man of French descent
from Detroit, had an established home across the river. He was a good
friend of the Indians and they granted him a large plot: of land.
On that plot the town Providence was platted in 1835 and it thrived with
the canal business. Providence met bad fortune with a terrible
fire in 1846 and was completely devastated by a cholera epidemic in
1854. The most: important structure remaining is St. Patrick's
Catholic Church, one of the oldest churches in the Toledo diocese.
St. Patrick's is an active church today.
Canal to create a very important water link for transportation and
commerce. The first dam at the rapids was built to provide water
for the canal system. Providence became a thriving canal town and
a side cut was provided for Gilead. Gilead's name was changed to
Grand Rapids in 1868.
The coming of the railroads that crisscrossed the country spelled the
end of the need for the canals. There was not much canal traffic
after 1910, but some boats traveled the canal until the early 1930's.
South of Grand Rapids was a huge„ very marshy area called the Black
Swamp. It must have been very foggy, muddy, and miserable.
Disease was rampant because of the hordes of mosquitoes. Traveling
was almost impossible. It was during the Civil War that draining
of this area began so that roads could be built to carry the troops and
materiel of war.