The Whitewater Canal Trail offers you:

The Whitewater Canal Trail offers you:. Laurel Feeder Dam. , Welcome to the Whitewater Canal Trail. Right now, about 9 miles of the planned 13-mile trail are complete. When the Feeder Dam section of the trail is finished, it will cover the four miles from here to the US 52 trailhead near Metamora. (See nearby sign for current trail status.) The mile markers along the trail show the distance from the Laurel Feeder Dam., From here you can travel along the canal, passing three old canal locks, to the historic canal town of Metamora which has a working grist mill and the famous covered-bridge aqueduct., As you leave Metamora, the Whitewater River Valley opens to a view of farm fields, wooded areas and of some of Southern Indiana's finest scenery. After about two miles, you'll arrive at the "Twin Locks." In another .75 miles, you'll cross a wooden bridge where you'll see a small aqueduct carrying the canal over Goose Creek. As you approach the Yellow Bank Trailhead there's a side trail for a close-up look at Lock 21., After you pass the Yellow Bank Trailhead, you'll see one of our habitat restoration projects in the basin of a canal era "ice pond" and relics of the old highway., For now, the main trail ends just past the eleven-mile marker. Plans are in place to complete the trail to Brookville., Two small parts of the trail in Brookville are open to the public the Billy Jean Jobe Trail is on 7th Street, about two blocks west of Main Street. At Tecumseh Landing, at the south end of Brookville near the Family Dollar Store, you can take a short walk to a gravel beach on Whitewater River., Laurel Feeder Dam , Just over the hill from here, you will find the Laurel Feeder Dam-a dam "feeds" water into the canal. Of the seven original feeder dams built for the Whitewater Canal, this is the only one still in existence., After the railroad was built along the canal in the 1860s, freight and passenger boats no longer traveled the canal. However, there were still several water-powered mills operating on the canal between here and Brookville., The hydraulic company maintained the dam to assure the flow of water to these mills-at least until the early 1920s when it became unprofitable to operate. The canal gradually became little more than a muddy ditch and the dam fell into disrepair., In the early 1940s, a citizens' group, the Whitewater Canal Association, made some stopgap repairs to the dam but they only lasted a few years., Ultimately, the state accepted ownership of the dam as part of the Whitewater Canal State Memorial and rehabilitated the dam starting in the late 1940s. Since then the state has maintained the dam (see photo at left). It keeps the water flowing in the canal for the grist mill in Metamora and then all the Way to Yellow Bank Creek.