I’ve previously written a history of the Miami and Erie canal in Dayton that included a then and now photo of an 1899 celebration that included two elephants bathing in the canal. In that post I used a visible business and map to determine where that location is today.
This article will do a similar investigation of an old canal photo I recently came across:
The image is titled “Canal at Second Street” from 1903. At first glance it wasn’t immediately apparent which direction the photo is facing. But a few clues from the photo caption can help us figure it out.
The business that can be identified is the George J. Roberts Company, which was located at the northwest corner of Second and Mill Streets.
The other major clue is that the park visible on the left side of the photo is identified as the “Library Park” which we can understand to mean Cooper Park behind the downtown library.
That lets us know that the old photo is facing north, but especially since Mill Street no longer exists, it’s a good idea to pull up Sanborn Maps of the area to better understand the orientation.
In the following image I stitched together 2 maps so we can see the George J. Roberts Co is located (circled in red) as well as the library park.
(I also have written a history about the building at the corner of Spratt and Harris in the image, the Dayton Ice Manufacturing and Cold Storage Co.)
Now we can compare the historic photo to a present-day image:
This area would change radically in the decades after this picture was taken. The canal, already pretty dilapidated by 1903 as can be seen, was given its death blow a decade later by the Great Flood.
The building of the George J. Roberts Company and surrounding area was largely turned in to parking lots for Delco employees as that company moved nearby just after the flood and grew into an industrial behemoth.
Only more recently did that land get filled back in with the condo buildings, and now this is the fastest-growing area of downtown with major hotel, apartment, and other mixed-use development projects in recent years, including Delco’s first and second factories.
The majority of the structures present in the historic image are of course long gone today, but if you look closely you can identify a group of canal buildings that survive to the right of the image (although they’re a bit obscured by trees in the modern-day image).
These include industrial structures that once held tenants like A. N. Nixon’s Tobacco Warehouse and today house Canal St. Arcade and Deli and its neighbors, and the former canal depot building which was used for received and shipped merchandise traveling on the canal and is today DECA Middle School. See those old canal buildings in more detail.
I think you’ve found the right location. However, I think that the George J. Roberts company was on the Southeast corner of N. Mill and 2nd St. (rather than the Northwest corner). I had to rotate your map until Second St ran (mostly E – W) then locate the “Canal Walk” and Library, then compared with Google maps and a map from 1875. The Miami Canal Extension has been replaced by North Patterson Blvd. (Even the angle to the west at Second St.) The street on the 1903 map, called Harris, now appears to have been replaced by Harries. (per Google maps). Would have placed the 1903 photographer’s location South of Second street, just a few yards farther south than the included Google street maps photo and a few yards to the left (In the center or eastern side of North Patterson Blvd)