The Reservoir War: A History of Ohio's Forgotten Riot in America's Gilded Age, 1874-1888

A 445-page history of the “Reservoir War” — the night of April 25, 1887, when roughly 200 men calling themselves “The Dynamiters,” under a banner reading “No Compromise! The Reservoir Must Go!,” destroyed the Wabash and Erie Canal’s Six Mile Reservoir east of Antwerp: overpowering its guards, dynamiting the bulkhead and lock, and burning the lockkeeper’s house. The reservoir, built in 1840, had become mostly a breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitoes once canal traffic dried up in the 1870s; state legislative attempts to abandon it had repeatedly failed. The Dynamiters were never identified or punished, and the reservoir’s abandonment became law the following year. The county’s motto, “No Compromise,” comes from this event.

This archive already has a brief account of the Reservoir War in the county engineer’s history overview and an unattributed county history typescript, and the event’s own HMdb.org historical marker — reported missing — is listed in the historical markers index. Godeke’s book is, per contemporary local news coverage, the most exhaustive account of the event to date, drawing on primary and secondary sources; it isn’t reproduced here, just linked as further reading.