As we embark on commemorating significant 200-year anniversaries of the construction and opening of the Welland Canal, this series will explore what happened to the old canals and why, especially in the 20^th century.  

The First Welland Canal has a clear history: the project fell victim to reconstruction, with little infrastructure remaining afterwards. The Second and Third Canals, however, fell victim to a complex jumble of attitudes, apathy, budgets, and forgetfulness and have been slowly erased from the landscape. 

In the case of the Third Canal, its lack of established factories and communities along the route made it easier to let it go.  

The operational life of the Second Canal was drawn out for waterpower and water intake and drainage by the industries long established along its banks, even though, by the 1920s, navigation had long since ended. 

It is the Second Welland Canal which holds the public imagination as the window to a bygone era where ships and barges were gently pulled along by horses, and where people worked inside the neighbourhoods where they lived.  

Rich romanticism, spawned mostly by the adoring historiography generated over the last 70 years by those who wish to breathe life into the abandoned locks, has encouraged conservation, education, and appreciation for the canal.  

But it hasn’t always been that way.  

This November, we’ll be looking at the public perception and response to the construction and management of the canal to better understand the place the canal holds in the public consciousness. 

Part 1: Apathy and Indifference 

The history of the Welland Canal is filled with what Merritt identified as “apathy and indifference,” as he noted in 1824. Fast-forward 100 years and the same old attitudes stuck to the old canals. 

1824 

When William Hamilton Merritt and supporters petitioned the legislature for support in building the Welland Canal, they failed. The high cost of the project and scarcity of money, limited any response from the government in 1818.  

Instead of giving up, they (the soon-to-be Welland Canal Company) set out on a lonely path and commissioned their own surveys. When the final route was announced and the Company was incorporated in 1824, it was revealed only a small group of investors, local millers, and farmers, would benefit directly and those left out bitterly turned their backs on the company.  

Some returned their shares, others openly complained.  

The history of the Welland Canal has made the project seem to modern eyes like a done deal, and that starting up the company and getting shovels in the ground was inevitable. Histories have romanticized the hard work needed to get the project going, let alone completed.  

For more on the challenges of building the First Welland Canal, read our series How the Story Goes: Reexamining the Story of the First Welland Canal. 

We don’t need to peel back layers of historiography to find that discontent about the canal began immediately: Merritt himself complained about the attitudes held by his contemporaries, calling out naysayers who wouldn’t open their wallets and striking out the narrative of a national project that would tie the provinces together for the benefit of all. 

“We have had difficulties and prejudices to contend with…not one individual in the province of extensive capital, or in any high official station has given it the least assistance…and it is astonishing to think of the apathy and indifference that has hitherto prevailed amongst us on this subject.”¹

1835

Merritt met his match in William Lyon Mackenzie. Before his infamous leadership of the rebellion in Upper Canada, Mackenzie spent months as a thorn in the side of Merritt, sifting through the accounts of the Welland Canal Company – hugely in debt and over budget – with microscopic precision.

The province of Upper Canada and a handful of deep-pocketed American investors had sunk a remarkable sum into the canal project, which by the mid-1830s needed constant repairs and enlargements. The money wasn’t there in the 1820s, and the returns promised by the Welland Canal Company had yet to appear.

Mackenzie eviscerated Merritt in his self-published newspaper and accused Merritt of grand maleficence.

“The entries of the tolls in this blundering way, and by sort of wholesale system, induced me to enquire whether Mr. Merritt and friends had a profit by the commission, and I had found they had… I asked [them] to explain, and [they] said it was a mistake! Such mistakes as those could only be made by those who wished to make mistakes, as must be evident to every candid investigator.”²

1841

The Welland Canal’s reconstruction to stone locks began in earnest after the government reluctantly bought out the ownership of the Welland Canal Company and transitioned its management to a Board of Works. It wasn’t cheaper, and the arrival of thousands destitute Irish labourers along the route of the project further disillusioned the project in the eyes of residents.

Over five thousand Irish immigrants and their families arrived in Niagara between 1841 and 1847 looking for work and food. Often, the canal works would stop – for whatever reason – and their precarious way of life was made worse. The pressure absorbed by the local population (only approximately three thousand people) included damaged property, stolen livestock and foodstuffs, and outright harassment.

“One riot is the parent of many others, for after one of their factional fights, the friends of the worsted party really from all quarters to avenge the defeat.”³

“However easy it may be for those who are at a distance to speculate on the propriety of delaying the work until precise instructions may arrive, it is very difficult for me, surrounded by men infuriated by hunger, to persist in a course which must drive them to despair.”⁴

“The influx of into the Province of…4000… Irish labourers, who had been engaged on the works in the United States prior to their suspension has increased our difficulty, especially on the Niagara frontier….I have to request, therefore, that you will be so good as to have the necessary steps taken for the stationing of troops there, taken without loss of time…”⁵

1881

Confederation and the reorganization of canal and railway management dramatically shifted the power balance and decision making from those with local concerns to those with national priorities. In a way, Merritt had always intended that the canal be a national project and be used to fortify nationalism across the disparate Canadian regions around the Great Lakes and beyond. Whether he’d accept the federal government taking ownership and control of the works away from local interests, is questionable.

The local promoters taking on the “faraway feds” who might miss the importance which the canal played to local industrial growth and employment, bemoaned the threat changing canal management made to their standard of living provided by the canal.

How could the government abandon the very community that had driven the creation of wealth, communication, and transportation in the first place?

“The principal business on this canal, for a number of years at least, must be through trade; therefore, there will be no mills, or factories, or other places where vessels will be at all likely to unload or receive cargo on the new line.”⁶

The Third Canal construction coincided with train travel and the tourism boom that brought thousands to Niagara. The construction of this new canal – the largest in Canada yet – became an attraction and was constantly marveled as a vital instrument of modernism.

1927

The Fourth Canal or Welland Ship Canal was to similarly attract the attention of locals and tourists alike who came to observe modern construction techniques and machinery on such a large scale, the locks still attract thousands of tourists every year. But while the Ship Canal was impressive, it’s large scale was very disruptive to the local population, more so than had previous canal projects.

“You perhaps think you did not do much damage and it don’t matter much. Well, there was our vegetables, flowers, rotting fruit, trees rotting at the roots; besides the soil being impoverished, the fence posts seeping in wells our drinking water spoiled. Our son had diphtheria last winter…I think we are letting you off easy with 200 dollars, but we need it now not when we are dead. Please let us know if you can settle with us before Christmas and oblige.”⁷

Severe flooding throughout the system wasn’t the only problem. Noise from construction, including jackhammering and blasting, could carry on at all hours: “The noise was very disagreeable and nerve-wracking, a real menace to health in this community.”⁸

Construction was so disruptive that municipalities had to move reservoirs, endure disruption to industrial water sources, homes and farms were expropriated and split, and an entire cemetery had to be moved before it was flooded.

And then, consider the monetary expense of the project. The Ship Canal was estimated to cost $50 million dollars in 1912. By 1920 it was $75 million dollars. The final tally was approximately $150 million dollars by 1932.

What Have You Done for Me Lately?

The culmination of attitudes and monetary costs, loss of land and any perceived negative impact to the standard of living in the community could only ever be repaired by a successful canal operation. If the canal was no longer of use, then why would anyone spend energy, time, or money on something that was unable to return any investment?

It’s a difficult attitude to measure because it is complex. It isn’t all about money, but simultaneously, any preservation is extremely expensive. It is not as simple as saying “oh, let’s just fill it in”, while simultaneously struggling with the unsafe conditions left behind.

Instead, we need to examine the context of the time in which decisions were made to abandon and fill in the old canals and try to better understand the motivations behind those decisions.

That’s next.

Watch for Part Two of this series: “The Modern City” coming November 10, 2024

Adrian Petry is a public historian and Visitor Services Coordinator at the St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre.

1. An excerpt from Merritt’s speech at the sod-turning November 30, 1823. J.P. Merritt. Biography of the Hon. W.H. Merritt, M.P., of Lincoln, district of Niagara, including an account of the origin, progress and completion of some of the most important public works in Canada. St. Catharines: Leavenworth,1875. 66-66. ↩︎
2. William Lyon Mackenzie. The Welland Canal: A Weekly Journal. Toronto: Mackenzie, December 30 1835. ↩︎
3. Ruth Bleasdale. “Class Conflict on the Canals of Upper Canal in the 1840s.” Labour/Le Travail. Spring, 1981. Vol. 7. 22. ↩︎
4. Bleasdale, 25. ↩︎
5. Killaly to Rawson, August 19, 1842. The Great Swivel Link. Edited by Roberta Styran and Robert Taylor. The Champlain Society, Toronto, 2001. 127.  ↩︎
6. Sessional papers, House of Commons debates. Parliament of Canada, February 8, 1881. ↩︎
7. Mr. and Mrs. Francis B. Grundy to Chief Engineer Alexander Grant, December 10, 1927. As found in This Colossal Project by Roberta Styran and Robert Taylor. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2015. 203-204. ↩︎
8. Board of Health report to Chief Engineer Alexander Grant, 1927. As found in This Colossal Project by Roberta Styran and Robert Taylor. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2015. 205. ↩︎