Notes From My Knapsack 4-23-06
Jeff Gill

Dugway Opens the Road

Discussion of an interchange for Rt. 16 and Cherry Valley Road takes us very close to the roots of Licking County transportation history.
Before the National Road and the Ohio & Erie Canal criss-crossed this area in the 1830’s, the network of roads and paths were less linear and had to fit both the terrain and the limitations of both human and animal power.
The angle of West Main Street through Newark, offset to north-south or east-west lines of the surveyed city, traces back to the first maps we have, and likely follows an early American Indian path from the meeting of the Licking River forks to the Scioto River drainage west.
Weaving into what’s now James Road, Canyon and River Roads, possibly linking with Morse Road, the Native American footways were trodden down by European shoes, widened for mule and ox teams, and slowly straightened (a bit) for wagon and stagecoach.
The same is probably true for what we now call Rt. 13, up from Somerset, the early regional center, where many of Newark’s "first citizens" came from, weaving north along the first terraces above the marshy river bottoms to Mount Vernon and on to Mansfield.
Between Newark and the northwest, to Granville, the main road also follows a unique angle which may also hint at pre-settler trails.
Less well remembered, or traceable on the map, is that the highlands now called "Morgan Manor" stretched to a drop-off to Raccoon Creek, creating a major obstacle for the first travelers who weren’t on foot to get from the area of Granville St. in Newark to where Newark-Granville Road heads into the latter named village – and almost where the new interchange is proposed.
The first settlers, and for many years, had to make a double crossing of the creek, jouncing down and laboring back out of the riverbed, a path which had to be laboriously rebuilt after each spring and every major rain.
What now unnamed citizens took on was a "graded way," or "dugway" through the saddle of the ridge just north of Raccoon Creek, cutting a deeper path that lessened the grade for oxen to make the slope up and over into the eastern edge of the Granville area.
Done, necessarily, with shovels and stoop labor alone, this was Licking County’s first major public works project. It was memorable enough that the district west of Newark proper north of the creek was, and is still to some, known as "Dugway."
In fact, if you travel west on Rt. 16 and peel off to the right onto Granville Road, just as you leave the expressway a small part of the old Dugway is still visible to your left, fenced off but clearly evident if you know what you’re looking at. The age of the trees growing down on the sides of the trench show the antiquity of this site.
ODOT will probably use this area for staging and construction purposes when the Cherry Valley interchange is built, but I hope someday the area can be not only preserved but memorialized in some way. The Dugway is a clear witness to the elemental labors that were needed to make transportation and community expand and connect in early Licking County, just as the area’s growth requires a more technologically elegant, but not dissimilar solution, along Rt. 16 today.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; write him at disciple@voyager.net.