Like Bridgewater and New Brighton, Glasgow was a canal town. The Sandy and Beaver Canal, however, never became a successful' heavily-traveled waterway like the Beaver Divisions, and Glasgow remains the tiny, out-of-the-way community it was when it was founded.
George Dawson patented four hundred acres of the unsettled land on the north side of the river in 1813. In 1836, surveyor Sanford C. Hill laid out the town. Job Harvey, a paper mill operator from the Beaver Creek valley, built the first house in town, followed by the home and store of John Brinton.
The success of New York State's Erie Canal had spread canal fever across the country, and the dream of Lisbon, Ohio and Columbiana County farmers to have a canal through their valley was not an illogical one. The Ohio River had just been joined to the eastern part of the state by the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal, and a waterway from the Ohio directly west to the Ohio and Erie Canal in the Tuscarawas Valley seemed to be a most practical investment. The headwaters of the Big Sandy Creek, a tributary of the Tuscarawas, meshed with those of the Little Beaver just west of Lisbon, and the Little Beaver led to the Ohio River at Glasgow, making an ideal water route.
However, engineering problems, financial crises, the completion of a parallel canal to the north (New Castle to Akron) and the advent of the railroad resulted in the Sandy and Beaver Canal's early abandonment. After twenty years of construction, the canal opened in 1848 already outmoded by small lock-size and soon to be made obsolete by the railroad. The canal operated over its entire 73 mile length only one summer, after fears of insufficient water on the summit proved true. Local freight hauls were made from Glasgow to Lisbon for several years, but the canal did not bring prosperity.
But good fortune was in store for the community, although the accompanying fame would be accorded to the neighboring village of Smith's Ferry. Glasgow was incorporated in 1854. The borough never had a post office, but mail was delivered through Smith's Ferry, an unincorporated village in Ohio Township. The Smith's Ferry Methodist Church was founded in Glasgow in 1867.
It was the 1860 discovery of oil in the valley of Dry Run that brought attention to Smith's Ferry and eclipse to Glasgow. The borough benefited from the commerce generated by the oil boom, but the name remained undistinguished. (Glasgow's obscurity continues to the present, for the local telephone exchange is still called Smith's Ferry, although the latter name has long disappeared from the map). Only two homes and the one-room Rockport School remain from the oil boom days.
Glasgow, in the twentieth century, is largely unchanged. The former school has been remodeled for use as a municipal building. The trolley came around 1915 and closed down about twenty years later, but the right of way can still be seen along the north edge of town. A depression in the earth marks the route of the Sandy and Beaver Canal along the west side of town, and a large pile of cut stone just offshore remains from the walled channel between Lock 57 (at the end of Liberty Street) and the river. Due to its level being raised by dams downstream, the river has washed away much of Front Street. Glasgow, with Ohioville and Industry, is a member of the Western Beaver School District.