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Abstract

Buena Vista stone (siltstone from what is technically called the Buena Vista Member of the Cuyahoga Formation) was used for the stonework of the extant (north) entranceway of the historic 1840s Cleves Tunnel. Also known as the White-water Tunnel, the Harrison Tunnel, and the North Bend Tun-nel, it is probably the westernmost canal tunnel in the United States, and it was placed on the National Register of His-toric Places in 2001. This is a rare extant example of the use of Buena Vista stone for a canal structure in the Cincinnati area. The grain size of the rock and the burrows (ichnofossils) found in it are characteristic of Buena Vista stone.

Buena Vista stone was quarried, beginning in the early 1800s, north, west, and southwest of Portsmouth, Ohio, in

Adams, Scioto, and Pike Counties, and continues to be quar-ried today northwest of McDermott, in Scioto County. Ease of shipment via river and canal led to widespread use of the Buena Vista in the southwestern quarter of Ohio, from Cin-cinnati to Dayton and from Portsmouth to Columbus.

The use of Buena Vista stone for the Cleves Tunnel con-trasts with that of limestone for other extant canal structures in the Cincinnati area.

Introduction

Between 1825 and 1845, two major Ohio canal complexes were constructed in Ohio: The Miami & Erie Canal ran from Cincinnati to Toledo and the Ohio & Erie Canal stretched from Portsmouth to Cleveland (fig. 1). Most, but not all, of

The Cleves Tunnel, a Rare Extant Example of the Use of Buena Vista Stone for a Canal Structure near Cincinnati, Ohio

Joseph T. Hannibal, The Cleveland Museum of Natural Historyand

Richard Arnold Davis, The College of Mount St. Joseph, Cincinnati, Ohio

Figure 1. Location map showing Ohio canals, canal towns and cities, and localities noted in the text. Modified from Hannibal (1998, fig. 1) and Canal Society of Ohio (1989).

CANAL

ER

IEMIA

MI &

ERIEC

AN

AL

OH

IO &

CLEVELAND

TOLEDO

PENNSULA

AKRONYOUNGSTOWN

Pennsylvania& Ohio Canal

Sandy &Beaver Canal

Portage Lakes

WalhondingCanal

COSHOCTON

ZANESVILLE

MARIETTA

Muskingum RiverImprovement

Hocking ValleyCanal

Milan CanalWabash &Erie Canal

ST. MARYS

PIQUA

COLUMBUS

NEWARK

DAYTON

CINCINNATI

CLEVESNORTH BEND

Cincinnati &WhitewaterCanal

WAVERLY

PORTSMOUTHWEST PORTSMOUTH

McDERMOTT

ROCKVILLE

BUENA VISTA

Grand LakeSt. Marys

LakeLoramie Indian Lake

BuckeyeLake

N

0 10 20 30 40 miles

0 10 20 30 40 50 kilometers

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the stones used for structures of the Miami & Erie Canal were limestones; all the identified stones used for structures of the Ohio & Erie Canal were siltstones, sandstones, and conglom-erates (Hannibal, 1998, p. 5). Only one type of commer-cially available stone, a siltstone best known as “Buena Vista stone,” was used to any appreciable extent in both of these canal complexes. The purpose of this article is to document and discuss the use of Buena Vista stone for the Cleves Tunnel, because the tunnel is a rare extant example of the use of Bue-na Vista stone for a canal structure in the Cincinnati area.

Buena Vista Stone

Buena Vista stone was also known as “Buena Vista sand-stone,” “Buena Vista freestone” (fig. 2), “Waverly brown stone,” and, more simply, as “free stone” or “freestone.” The material was obtained from the lithostratigraphic unit recognized to-day by the Ohio Division of Geological Survey by its formal name, the Buena Vista Member of the Cuyahoga Formation. In this article we refer to the stone by the commercial name, Buena Vista stone. The stone was named for the little town of Buena Vista (fig. 1), which is located in Scioto County, just east of the Adams County line and some 20 miles (30 km) southwest of Portsmouth, Ohio. Rock of the Buena Vista Member caps the hills in eastern Adams County and western Scioto County. It is also found in Pike County, Ohio, and in north-central Kentucky (Orton, 1874; Richardson, 1923,

p. 111; Wilmarth, 1938, p. 286). The stone is Mississippian (Early Carboniferous) in age—some 350 million years old.

Identifying Buena Vista Stone

Buena Vista stone, although traditionally called sandstone in the building trade, actually is what is technically called silt-stone; it has a finer grain size than does sandstone. The beds selected as building stone generally are homogeneous, that is, they lack readily visible differences in grain size or sedimen-tary structures. Such stone often has been termed “freestone,” because it can be cut in any direction. Trace fossils (ichnofos-sils), consisting of tubes and other structures, are common in the unit, especially at the stratigraphic tops of beds (Hanni-bal, 1995, p. 255–256). When found in stone used for man-made structures (fig. 3), such trace fossils can be used to help confirm the identity of the stone.

History of Quarrying Buena Vista Stone

Buena Vista stone had been used in the Cincinnati area at least as early as 1814 (Howe, 1888, v. 2, p. 564; Kelley, 1982). General Nathaniel Massie acquired a parcel of land along the Ohio River at Buena Vista no later than 1801. Subsequently, he sold part of that land to Joseph Moore (Bownocker, 1915, p. 122). Moore used loose blocks of stone from the adjacent hills to build a house in the valley between Buena Vista and

Figure 2. Old advertisement for Buena Vista stone. The Buena Vista Freestone Company opened the quarries shown, possibly as early as the 1850s. Reprinted from Baird (1977), courtesy of Hummel Industries, Inc., Cincinnati, Ohio.

66 IndIana GeoloGIcal Survey occaSIonal PaPer 67

Rockville in 1814. Over the next 15 years or so, he rafted a large quantity of local stone downriver to Cincinnati. Moore was succeeded in the stone business by John Loughry in 1831 (Bownocker, 1915, p. 122, and following).

John Loughry (also spelled Loughrey) was a canal engi-neer. Presumably his knowledge both of canals and of build-ing stone led him to purchase the quarry-land at Rockville, in southeasternmost Adams County. The land subsequently would be known as “the Loughry Lands” (Lapham, 1833, p. 71; Howe, 1888, v. 2, p. 564; Kelley, 1982; Hannibal, 1998, p. 24).

Loughry and his men quarried the bedrock from three ledges at and near the tops of the hills in the area. It was that rock that was used for the canal locks in Cincinnati. By the time of his retirement in 1856, however, Loughry’s crews had long been quarrying lower beds, including the so-called “City Ledge,” and, in time, they worked only that part of the unit (Bownocker, 1915, p. 122, and following).

The City Ledge is in the lower part of the Buena Vis-ta Member, about 220 feet (67 m) above the flood plain of the Ohio River. It got its name because it was so popular amongst the architects, engineers, and builders of Cincinnati. Indeed, after the early 1840s, almost all the Buena Vista stone quarried for use in Cincinnati was obtained from this layer (Bownocker, 1915, p. 124–125).

More quarries were opened in the region in the mid-1800s (U.S. Census, 1880; Bownocker, 1915, p. 123). Quar-ries with production facilities at Buena Vista (fig. 2) were opened at least by 1864, but may have been opened in the 1850s (Kelley, 1982). Quarries north and northwest of Ports-mouth, in McDermott (fig. 1) and other places in Rush and Washington Townships of Scioto County, were operating in

Figure 3. Photograph of a portion of an exterior column of St. Peter in Chains Cathedral, located in downtown Cincinnati. The stone of the bottom drum is oriented as in nature; the top drum is oriented upside down (the trace fossils generally occur at the tops of beds and, thus, can be used as a geopetal indicator). Tu-bular trace fossils, between 0.1 and 0.3 inches in diameter (0.25 and 0.75 cm), help to identify the rock as Buena Vista stone. Pho-tograph originally published in Hannibal and Davis (1992).

the 1860s and 1870s. Some quarries supplied stone through-out the nineteenth century. The 1880 Census records the principal markets for these quarries. The main market for the Buena Vista Freestone Company was Cincinnati, via barge down the Ohio River. The principal market of the Inskeep Quarry, in Rush Township, was Columbus, Ohio, rock hav-ing been transported there by canal barge up the Ohio & Erie Canal. The Reitz and Bodie Quarry, in Washington Town-ship, shipped stone to various locations in Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. Buena Vista stone from McDermott, Ohio, was used in a number of states and prov-inces including British Columbia, Louisiana, Maine, and Illinois (Bownocker, 1915, p. 134). Most quarries had closed by the early 1900s, but Buena Vista stone is quarried to this day northwest of McDermott, in Rush and Union Town-ships, Scioto County, by the Waller Brothers Stone Company (Wolfe, 2001, p. 125). More information on the Buena Vis-ta stone and its quarrying history and uses can be found in King (1976), Kelley (1982), Hannibal and Davis (1992), and Hannibal (1995).

History of the Cleves Tunnel

The Cleves Tunnel is also known as the Whitewater Tun-nel, the Harrison Tunnel (Morthorst, 2000, p. 41, 46), and the North Bend Tunnel (Fugate, 2001, p. 61). Construction of the tunnel began in 1839 and continued into the 1840s; its exact date of completion is not known, but the canal opened for business on November 28, 1843 (Fugate, 2001, p. 68, 73, 78). The tunnel was in use for only a short time, in the 1840s and early 1850s, as part of the Cincinnati & Whitewater Canal, also known as the Cincinnati branch of the Whitewater Canal, between the valley of the Miami Riv-er (Great Miami River) and that of the Ohio (WPA, 1943, p. 505; Giglierano and others, 1988, p. 514, 523). The canal was no longer used after the mid-1850s (Giglierano and oth-ers, 1988, p. 514; Morthorst and others, 2000, p. 11; Fugate, 2001, p. 78–79), and, within a few years after the demise of the canal as a waterway, trains began operating on tracks laid on the former towpath and in the canal bed.

The tunnel is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was discussed in “Towpaths,” the journal of the Ca-nal Society of Ohio, by Fugate (2001); it was put into historic context in the same journal by Morthorst (2000). The tun-nel and other canal features in the region also were discussed in Morthorst and others (2000). According to Fugate (2001, p. 68–69), the Cleves Tunnel was the first canal tunnel in Ohio, “and most probably the westernmost canal tunnel in the United States.” Part of the northern terminus of the tun-nel, in Cleves, west of Cincinnati, is still visible. The southern end, in North Bend, is not evident; whether it was totally de-stroyed or merely collapsed (see illustration in Fugate, 2001, p. 79) and was buried in the course of road construction is not clear. An historic anecdote in the 1943 Cincinnati guide-book produced by the Writers’ Project of the Work Progress

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Administration relates that future president William Henry Harrison “narrowly escaped death while the tunnel was un-der construction. He was riding his horse over it when the ground caved in. The horse was killed but Harrison escaped injury” (WPA, 1943, p. 505).

Use of Buena Vista Stone for the Cleves Tunnel

Many sources note the use of Buena Vista stone for canal locks in the Cincinnati area (Stivers, 1900, p. 426; Bownocker, 1915, p. 123, 124; King, 1976) as well as culverts (Neuhardt, 1989, p. 17). Because of the destruction or burial of canal structures, however, it has been hard to verify the use of Bue-na Vista stone in the Cincinnati area for the Miami & Erie Canal and the Cincinnati & Whitewater Canal. Stone for the no-longer-extant aqueduct over Mill Creek in Cincinnati, just north of its flowing into the Ohio River, is said to have come from Rockville, Adams County (Bonsall, 1839, quoted and interpreted in Fugate, 2001, p. 76), as is stone for the arch of the Mill Creek culvert (Neuhardt, 1989, p. 17). De-spite written indications of use of Buena Vista stone for struc-tures in the Cincinnati area, neither Trevorrow (1986) nor Hannibal (1998) noted any specific examples of the use of the Buena Vista stone for extant canal structures there.

Detailed examination of the lithologic and paleontologic features of the rock used for the stonework of the exposed north entrance of the Cleves Tunnel reveals it to be Buena Vista stone, not limestone as previously reported (Fugate, 2001, p. 62). The exact site of the quarry that supplied the stone for the Cleves Tunnel of the Cincinnati & Whitewater Canal is not known. Fugate’s extensive examination of historic docu-ments (2001, p. 76) failed to find any mention of the source of the stone used for the tunnel. Because of the tunnel’s date of construction, however, it is likely that the stone was quar-ried near the villages of Rockville and Buena Vista. And, as noted above, stone from Rockville was being used for at least one stone arch in the region at that time (Bonsall, 1839, quot-ed in Fugate, 2001, p. 76; Neuhardt, 1989, p. 17).

The stone for the tunnel entrance (figs. 4–6), like some of the stone along the Miami & Erie Canal, is nicely worked. The top and bottom edges of many blocks are rusticated (that is, they have recessed joints) and chamfered, like those noted by Lapham (1833, p. 71) for the Cincinnati locks. This is not surprising as Lapham designed the tunnel (Fugate, 2001, p. 68–69). Moreover, the exposed vertical surfaces are bush hammered and have nicely drafted margins (fig. 5–6). The stone of the tunnel entrance, however, has suffered from weathering. The weathering is differential; there is greater deterioration at the tops and bottoms of the stone blocks, along what appear to be bedding planes (fig. 6).

Both the burrows and the grain size of the rock (fig. 7) are comparable to those of siltstones characteristic of the Buena Vista Member. The burrows readily seen in the stone of the tunnel entrance are 5 mm or less across. They are similar to those visible in the columns of Buena Vista stone in St. Peter in Chains Cathedral in Cincinnati, built in 1845 (fig. 3).

Figure 4. Photograph (1998) of the north entrance of the Cleves Tunnel, with the tunnel arch and several courses of Buena Vista stone visible. Only the top part of the tunnel is exposed; sedi-ment fills most of the tunnel and covers most of the entrance-way. According to original records reported by Fugate (2001, p. 73), the tunnel was 20.5 ft high (6.25 m) from the floor of the canal to the ceiling of the tunnel.

Figure 5. Photograph (1998) showing courses of Buena Vista stone (to the right of that shown in the previous figure). This is a protective wing-wall. The blocks seen here and in subsequent illustrations are 12 to 16 inches in height (32–41 cm).

The use of Buena Vista stone in the north entrance of the Cleves Tunnel contrasts with the use of other materials in three other nearby canal structures. Examination of the re-mains of the aqueduct of the Cincinnati & Whitewater Canal over the Miami River just west of Cleves, Ohio, conducted in May of 2004, revealed what appears to be Ordovician lime-stone from the Cincinnati area and Dayton limestone, but no Buena Vista stone. Likewise, limestone was used for the canal aqueduct where Kilby Road crosses the Dry Fork of the White-water River. Nearby, in the remains of the lock just north of the viaduct of I-275 over Kilby Road, the rock consists of local Ordovician limestone, complete with fossils of articulate bra-chiopods of the genus Rafinesquina, but no Buena Vista stone. (For more detailed locality information, see the map by Mor-

68 IndIana GeoloGIcal Survey occaSIonal PaPer 67

Figure 6. Photograph (1998) showing blocks of Buena Vista stone used for the north entrance to the Cleves Tunnel. Note cracking and spalling along upper and lower areas of the stone blocks.

Figure 7. Photograph (1998) showing coping, 6 inches high (15 cm), of the Cleves Tunnel. A tubular trace fossil (ichnofossil) is at about a 65-degree angle from the horizontal. Compare this to Figure 3, which shows the stone in the columns of St. Peter in Chains Cathedral.

Figure 8. Photograph (1998) of gravestones, mostly of Buena Vis-ta stone, in Congress Green Cemetery, North Bend, Ohio. White paint, perhaps applied in an effort at preservation, mars some of the stone surfaces.

thorst in Morthorst and others, 2000, p. 10; and Fugate, 2001, p. 65.)

Other Uses of the Buena Vista Stone in Ohio

Early travelers along the Ohio & Erie Canal noted free-stone (that is, Buena Vista stone) being processed in the Ports-mouth area. Maximilian, Prince of Wied, reported freestone being cut just north of Portsmouth in 1834 into blocks to be used for building stone and for tombstones in Portsmouth (Wied, 1841, p. 384). And in 1835, Cyrus Bradley noted freestone being quarried and cut into blocks and gravestones and being used for canal locks in the Portsmouth area (Bradley, 1906). Hannibal (1995, p. 35) documented the use of Buena Vista stone for a lock at West Portsmouth, Ohio.

Ease of shipment via river and canal led to widespread use of Buena Vista stone in the southwestern quarter of Ohio, from Cincinnati north to Dayton in the west and from Ports-mouth north to Columbus in the east. Buena Vista stone was used for older tombstones and monuments in Woodland Cemetery in Dayton, Ohio (Sandy, 1992, p. 18), Cincinna-ti’s famous Spring Grove Cemetery, and the historic Congress Green Cemetery at North Bend, Ohio (fig. 8). The stone also was used for a variety of structures in Cincinnati, including the columns of St. Peter in Chains Cathedral (fig. 3), the piers of the Roebling Suspension Bridge, and the piers of the for-mer Louisville and Nashville Railroad bridge (now a pedestrian bridge) over the Ohio River connecting Cincinnati, Ohio, and Newport, Kentucky (Bownocker, 1915, p. 126; Hannibal and Davis, 1992). Some older foundations and monuments in Co-lumbus are made of Buena Vista stone.

Conclusion

On the basis of silt grain size and trace fossils, the rock of the north end of the canal tunnel at Cleves, Ohio, is Buena Vista stone. This rock is from the Buena Vista Member of the Cuyahoga Formation and is Mississippian in age. It is likely that the stone for this tunnel was quarried near the villages of Rockville and Buena Vista, along the Ohio River in Ad-ams and Scioto Counties, Ohio. This tunnel is a rare extant example of the use of Buena Vista stone for a canal structure in the Cincinnati, Ohio, area. Its use for the tunnel contrasts with the use of limestone in other, nearby canal structures in the Cincinnati region.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Kathy Farago, who critiqued early drafts of the paper and offered helpful suggestions, and D. Flocke, of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who printed most of the illustrations. We also are grateful to Greg F. Moratschek, President of Hummel Restoration Division of Hummel Industries, Inc., Cincinnati, for permission to re-produce the image in Figure 2, to Lisa Van Doren of the Ohio Division of Geological Survey, to the Indiana Geological Sur-vey for their help with the production of Figure 1, and to two anonymous reviewers who provided useful critiques that im-proved the final version of this paper.

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