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 its 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 2: The Modern City

The establishment of the middle class, the dawn of paved roads, the introduction of major municipal projects like the Burgoyne Bridge and the Glenridge Bridge, and the arrival of airplanes all mark the 1910s and 1920s in St. Catharines (and other urban cities in Ontario).

The excitement and advancement of quality of life for residents in this time is comparable to the introduction of smart technology in our lives today. Computers in our cars? How about telephones in their homes. Photographing your meal with your smart phone? How about electric light. Supermarkets with all your needs met in one place. How about clean drinking water from the tap?

Huge expansions in industry and infrastructure took place in the 1920s. Gas and electric light competed to light the city. The road network expanded in size and quality. Both high-level bridges were built across the old canal connecting Glenridge and Western Hill to downtown. Schools and hospitals were expanded.

The introduction of technologies that led the revolution in daily life which arrived after the First World War in Canada didn’t necessarily dismantle all the ideas and attitudes long held from the past. Medicine, technology, and society were changing but not fast enough for folks to abandon preconceived notions of diseases and cleanliness, which fed their aspiration for middle class (clean and safe) lifestyles. This meant relegating and regulating to history, any uncomfortable and undesirable parts of urban life.

“Some twelve or fourteen years ago, Thomas R. Merritt, who then owned the Welland House, had a drain constructed for the purpose of getting rid of the mineral water from the bath house, but it has since been used for the general purposes of the Welland House. The drain was constructed of drainpipes until it reached the brow of the hill on J. P. Merritt’s property. It was then taken down through his property to the canal in a small wooden box-drain. This has naturally rotted away, and the drainage comes out on the hillside, creating a most dangerous stench, endangering the lives of those living in the neighbourhood and being, in the opinion of our medical men, the cause of the serious illness of several living in this part of the city. Who the responsible parties are I do not pretend to say, but that a most dangerous nuisance exists is patent to the noses of every passerby, and immediate steps should be taken by the authorities to remove it.”¹

Trying to discover motivations of the past has always troubled historians, but it’s this confusing combination of new and clean vs. old and dirty that is at the centre of urban development in the early 20th century. The City Beautiful movement of the 1920s and 1930s was an architectural and urban planning movement that arose in response to the challenges posed to cities by the domination of capitalism on the landscape, juxtaposed against the slum-like living conditions endured by the poor and immigrants. The effort required massive and expensive planning to bring tree-lined broadways and avenues to crowded downtowns, with an emphasis on architectural uniformity, beauty, light, and cleanliness.

The expensive ideas of the City Beautiful movement were destroyed by the economic destruction created by the Great Depression. But the ideas, attitudes, and lessons involved in transitioning urban environments to orderly and clean places to live stayed.

The desire to clean up the city (regarding old infrastructure or the poor) was not unique to St. Catharines. Big cities like Toronto and Winnipeg were dealing with the impacts of poverty, immigration, and increased density in the 1920s. Always behind in public infrastructure, municipal Boards of Health reported shabby and slum-like living conditions in Toronto’s “The Ward”, Winnipeg’s “The North End”, and in St. Catharines on Facer Street. Orphan homes and institutions for the poor and destitute, ill and mentally ill were created for the care of those people, but to the benefit of putting them “somewhere else.”

Combine the geographical othering of immigrants to parts of the city away from the middle class with the huge advances in local and canal infrastructure and technology, and anything that didn’t fit in with these new wonderous things, was swept under the rug, at best. At worst: any obstacle to maintaining the way of life now afforded to residents was villainized.

Without the money to rectify the problem, the result was predetermined, especially for the crumbling or abandoned infrastructure of the Welland Canal.

Even when the public began to feel secure again (say, after the Second World War) and the middle class exploded throughout the country, the old canal’s value as a heritage asset was still not realized.

It can’t be all about money, then, can it?

Watch for Part Three of this series: “The Dumping Ground” coming November 17, 2024

Catch part one of the series:

Part One: Apathy and Indifference

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

1. Mr. James Taylor, Letter to the Editor. St. Catharines Journal, August 3, 1878. ↩︎