Integrated Learning-Living Communities

With New York Gov. DeWitt Clinton’s ditch (canal) completed, Ohio’s political leaders advanced the interests of its farms and industries by inviting the Irish and German immigrants who had gotten their feet wet in the Erie Canal to help build Ohio’s Miami-Erie canal. 

This enabled Dayton’s output to avoid the prior route — a long circuitous journey (down the Great Miami, west on the Ohio, south on the Mississippi up the Atlantic coast) — to New York, the destination of nearly all of Ohio’s ‘exports and the source of virtually all of Ohio’s imports. 

In addition to being towed on the water by mules in October 2023, the BEES (Business Ethics and Environmental Sustainability integrated living learning community) got to tour the museum of artifacts, revealing the extensive variety of trade goods swapped between the French, the British, the Miami (or Tweightewee)—before most Native Americans— as well as the Shawnee, the Delaware, the Wyandot and the MIngos  were ‘invited to leave’ (some by canal) or points west, especially Oklahoma.

Some goods were home-made. Students got to sample fudge and other candy (made from a  period recipe) by docents in period costume and tour the home of federal Indian agent Johnston, whose partner, Julia, a mother of 12, was a Patterson from Dayton (and an ancestor of the founder of NCR). Small world.