While some in Akron celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with lively traditions — from wearing green to raising glasses of green beer — others recognize its deeper historical significance.
Long before the rubber factories, Irish immigrants dug the canal that made the city possible.
Many Irish immigrants first arrived in New York before moving west to Akron, where in the 1820s they helped dig Lock 2 and sections of the Ohio & Erie Canal, said David Lieberth, president of the Akron History Center…