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Ohio had literally been carved out of a wilderness west of the Appalachians in the years after the American Revolution. The people who came to Ohio were seeking a new life as well as new land in the new country. Most of them found just that in the state that was named after the great river they followed to find their homes.

It may have been a good life but it was a very hard one as well. With the exception of occasional prairies full of buffalo and swamps full of water, the Ohio Country was a place of great unbroken forests, laced by streams and rivers of varied size and danger. It was a very difficult job to clear the land, build homes and begin to raise crops and livestock. By the early 1820s, after a generation of toil, many of those tasks had been done.

But a real problem still remained. Even if one could now raise large crops in the fertile soil, how were the corn and wheat to get to market? Roads were few and far between and the rivers were unpredictable at best -- often quite shallow in the summer and raging torrents after the spring floods.

Nearby New York state seemed to offer an answer. The Erie Canal ran across the state and offered a clean, safe and cheap model of transporation. Many people thought Ohio should build a canal of its own.

So Ohio did just that.

Originally, the plan was to build a single canal through the middle of the state. But limestone deposits north of Columbus meant that the only way to reach Lake Erie would be to blast one's way there. Rather than give up the idea completely, Ohioans resolved to build two canals rather than one. The Miami and Erie to the west linked Cincinnati to Toledo. The Ohio and Erie moved up the Scioto River valley from Portsmouth until it neared Columbus and then veered to the right, passing through Akron on its way to Cleveland. The capital city was joined to the main system by a feeder canal that reached the Ohio and Erie Canal at Lockbourne.

Work on the Ohio and Erie Canal began on July 4, 1825, with an elaborate ceremony near what is now Buckeye Lake. The construction of the Columbus Feeder began in 1827 with an equally festive celebration attended by more than 800 people. For a small town, this was an impressive turnout, indeed.

Part of the reason for the large attendance was the provision of a "cold repast" by innkeeper Christian Heyl and ample liquid refreshment to toast the new venture. Early toasts to the new project were rather tame: "The Ohio Canal -- The great artery which will carry vitality to the extremities of the nation."

As the party progressed, the toasts became more ... descriptive: "The citizens of Columbus -- Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell in unity. Who envies this day, let him sink back to his cavern and growl!"

On that happy note, prisoners from the nearby Ohio Penitentiary began to dig the first mile of the Columbus Feeder Canal. Once it became known that people could actually make money digging "the ditch," use of prisoners was ended and the balance of the canal was dug by private contractors. On Sept. 23, 1831, the first canal boat, the "Governor Brown," arrived in the city from the south and a new era began in Columbus. When the canal arrived with the National Road in 1831, Columbus was a city of about 1,700 people. Within two years, it would be a city of 5,000.

So what was it like to live and work on the Ohio Canal? Like most work in mid-1800s America, the hours were long, the pay was low and the working conditions were not all that pleasant from time to time. Consider that a canal is essentially a long ditch full of water that does not move around much. The canal drew its water from nearby rivers and streams whose wetlands were breeding grounds for malarial disease. The mules pulling the boats were often uncooperative -- especially when they were dragged nightly into their quarters in the middle of the boat. And if a passenger became accustomed to all of this, there was still the recurring joy of spending 15 minutes several times a day rising, falling and generally banging around in a seemingly endless number of canal locks.

But for all of this, many people came to genuinely like working on the canals. If the fights among diverse boats to enter a lock became hectic, there were still long periods when the only sound one heard was the gentle lapping of water against the boat as it moved at 3-4 miles per hour along the canal. Whole families lived and worked on the boats. A young man named Pearl Nye was born along the canal and spent his youth with his father, mother and his 17 siblings on the two boats owned and operated by the family.

In his later life, Capt. Pearl Nye remembered that life on the canal was a world unto itself. It had its own pace and style and culture and even its own special language. Some of the phrases coined by "canawlers," such as "towpath" and "lock," are still around. Others, such as "foo foo" for foreigner and "hoggee" for mule driver, have drifted into a well-deserved oblivion.

By the time Pearl Nye reached his early adulthood, the golden age of the Ohio Canal was already ending. By 1860, railroads had begun to displace the canals as the primary movers of people and goods in the country. The railroads did not freeze in the winter. They could be built in many places where water did not easily flow. And a train under full steam could go very fast.

The canal system in Ohio hung on into the early 20th century. But the devastating floods of 1913 spelled the end of significant canal traffic in the state. It would take most of the rest of the 20th century to dispose of the system. But men like Pearl Nye knew that an entire world was passing away. To save the best of that vanishing life, Nye and others like him spent their lives collecting Ohio Canal history.

The Pearl Nye collection of photos, stories and songs can be found a the Archives Library of the Ohio Historical Society. Many of his songs were recorded in the 1930s by the Library of Congress and can now be found in various forms on the Internet. Simply use "Canal Songs" as a search term and listen to Pearl Nye's world.

The stories, pictures and songs of the Ohio Canal they kept are a living legacy of a world now almost two centuries old, but with us still.

Ed Lentz writes a history column for ThisWeek.