08/30/2026
Sharing from Jim Smith and American Lore Vault
The Forgotten Ohio Job That Nearly Killed a Future President
A future president of the United States once spent six weeks walking beside a mule, and it almost got him killed.
In 1848, sixteen-year-old James Garfield left his family's farm near Cleveland, Ohio, to work the towpaths of the state's canal system. His job title was hoggee. He fell into the canal fourteen times during those six weeks, contracted malaria, and returned home so weak his mother barely recognized him. That illness ended his canal career and pushed him toward school instead. Three decades later, he was President of the United States.
The hoggee was one of thousands of jobs that vanished when Ohio's canal system collapsed under the weight of the railroad. Almost nobody remembers the word today. For about fifty years, it was one of the most common jobs a poor Ohio boy, or occasionally a girl, could get.
What a Hoggee Actually Did
A hoggee was the driver who walked the towpath alongside a canal boat, leading the mules or horses that towed it. Canal boats had no engines. The only way to move a fully loaded freight boat was to hitch a team of mules to a long rope and walk them, hour after hour, along a dirt path running parallel to the water.
The job sounds simple. It was not easy work. A typical crew rotated in six-hour shifts, which meant hoggees worked around the clock in stretches, day and night, seven days a week during the shipping season. Boys handled most of these jobs, though documented cases exist of girls doing the same work; one oral history from a related canal system describes a girl who started driving mules for her father's boat at age seven.
The origin of the word itself is disputed, and honest sources admit as much rather than pretending certainty. Some historians trace "hoggee" to an old English word, "hogler," meaning a low-ranking field laborer. Others argue it came from "haw" and "gee," the verbal commands used to steer a mule left or right. No canal historian claims to have settled the question definitively, so treat both origin stories as competing theories rather than fact.
The Ohio Angle
Ohio ran two major canal systems: the Ohio and Erie Canal, connecting Cleveland to Portsmouth along the Ohio River, and the Miami and Erie Canal, running from Cincinnati north to Toledo. Together they stretched hundreds of miles and required well over a hundred lift locks to manage changes in elevation. Every one of those boats needed a hoggee walking beside it.
The Ohio and Erie Canal alone ran 308 miles and required 146 lift locks between Cleveland and Portsmouth. Construction crews, many of them Irish and German immigrants, dug the canal by hand for wages as low as five dollars a month plus housing and a daily ration of whiskey. Once the canal opened in 1827, an entirely new labor economy grew up around keeping the boats moving, and the hoggee sat at the center of it.
Towns along the route built their economies around canal labor. Everett, a small settlement in what's now the Cuyahoga Valley, specialized in stables that housed and fed the mules and horses used on the towpath. Boys as young as nine or ten could find steady work walking animals up and down the same stretch of path, day after day, for a wage that barely covered survival.
Garfield's Canal Season
Garfield's own account of his hoggee days has been retold by biographers and historians for over a century, and the core details stay consistent across sources even though a few specifics shift depending on who's telling it. He was sixteen, fatherless, and dreaming of a life at sea when a shipping captain in Cleveland turned him away. He settled for canal work instead, driving the mule teams that pulled boats along the Ohio canal network. Some accounts specify the Ohio and Erie Canal; others describe the route between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. The exact stretch of water is less certain than the outcome: Garfield fell overboard fourteen times in six weeks, developed what doctors at the time called an "ague," almost certainly malaria, and returned home gravely ill.
His mother nursed him back to health and convinced him to give up canal life for school. He enrolled at Geauga Seminary that same year. Garfield later graduated from Williams College, became a Civil War general, a U.S. Senator, and in 1881, the twentieth President of the United States. He held the office for two hundred days before he was shot and killed.
Why the Job Disappeared
The hoggee didn't vanish because the work changed. It vanished because the canals themselves stopped being useful. Railroads could move freight faster, in worse weather, without needing to stop for ice, drought, or the mules that pulled every load in the water. Ohio's canal traffic began declining steadily after the Civil War, and by the 1861 flood that damaged large sections of the system, the state was already leasing out canal operations to private owners who had little incentive to maintain them.
By 1913, a catastrophic flood across Ohio finished what the railroads had started. Sections of both canal systems were drained, filled in, or built over. The mules went to farms. The boats rotted or were scrapped. The hoggees, many of them grown men by then, moved on to whatever work the railroad and industrial economy offered next.
What's Left Today
Nearly a hundred miles of the old Ohio and Erie Canal towpath survive as the Ohio and Erie Canal Towpath Trail, now used by hikers and cyclists rather than mule teams. A handful of restored locks, including a working one at Cuyahoga Valley National Park's Canal Exploration Center, still show visitors how the system functioned. The job itself left almost no physical trace beyond these preserved stretches of dirt path and the occasional canal-town museum.
It's easy to walk that trail today and miss what it once was: a corridor where nine-year-old boys walked mules for pennies a day, where a future president nearly died of fever, and where an entire state's economy depended on a job that no longer exists anywhere in America.
Click the link to the reel below ⬇️
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Sources:
Ohio Magazine, Case Western Reserve University's Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, the American Battlefield Trust, the National Park Service (Cuyahoga Valley National Park and James A. Garfield National Historic Site), Touring Ohio, the Ohio & Erie Canalway, the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, and the D&H Canal Historical Society.
