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 3: The Dumping Ground

“Dear Sir,

The Corporation of the City of the St. Catharines is applying for permission to construct and operate an outlet sewer for a new subdivision in that city, known as Glen Ridge, to be located between locks 3 and 4 on the Old Welland Canal as shown on the accompanying blueprint. They state the approval of the Provincial Board of Health for the sewerage system has been given.

Yours truly, W. A. Bowden, Chief Engineer”¹

“The residents of Glenridge were asking the city to discontinue the dumping and burning of refuse at Lock 4 for the smoke and stench blew their way.”²

The Welland Ship Canal

Increased focus on public health and wellbeing, resulting from construction projects like the Welland Ship Canal, meant that the public expected additional concessions to tolerate the disruptions. Growth for the economy wasn’t enough anymore. Locals expected clean roads, safe infrastructure, and even beautiful areas to spend their recreation time. Construction of the Welland Ship Canal had left the landscape severely damaged. Aside from the leftovers of construction: debris, piles of dirt, wrecked steam shovels, rusted and twisted railroads, and rundown buildings, the canal itself left a horrible impression.

“It is a massacre of many miles…It is one of the world’s marvels of engineering, but it is also one of the world’s greatest landscape lesions…an ugly incision in beautiful vineland and peach land.”³

The Department had planned to include parkways, park spaces, and gardens along the route of the canal, but those plans were also cancelled by the Great Depression.

But if the community felt so negatively about the impact the Welland Ship Canal made after enduring years of construction, then how did they feel about the old and abandoned canals?

The Third Welland Canal

As we have explored throughout the series, the public opinion of the remaining old and abandoned canals was poor. Campaigns throughout the 1930s pushed to have all the urban sections west of the new canal filled in. Since industry was not allowed to establish along the route, no industries protested its closure as a disruption to their operations as those on the Second Canal did.

The canal was gradually filled in over time, but sections between locks 5 to 9 were certainly filled in first. Housing developments are well established in the 1940s. Lock 4 and 5, between Ontario Street and Lake Street were infamously used for a time as a shooting range, and to dump snow, respectively. The entire urban line is now filled in and housing development, parkland, and Victoria Lawn Cemetery, has replaced much of its former footprint.

The “loop line” remains abandoned and is only partially (officially) accessible via the Bruce Trail. The St. Lawrence Seaway, which operates the Welland Ship Canal, uses the channel for drainage and it is still connected to the system, despite its locks slowly deteriorating and collapsing.

For more on the abandonment of the Third Welland Canal, watch our Lecture Series “Lost and Forgotten: the Third Welland Canal.”

The Second Welland Canal

More challenging to erase was the route of the Second Welland Canal. While it was no longer used for transportation as late as 1900, and its locks left to decay by the Department of Railways and Canals, it remained watered for industrial use. Papermills, mostly, and others situated along the line used the water for their processes and to flush their chemicals, which would turn the water yellow, green, pink, and create an awful stench.

Hydro-electric production also used the channel as it connected to 12-Mile Creek. In the 1940s, the channel northward of downtown was dredged, and Lock 2 at Welland Vale dismantled so to increase the waterflow capacity.

Since industry used the line, they were usually successful in petitioning for its general maintenance, and if it needed to be buried, for the water to be culverted, rather than stopped.

Unlike the Third Welland Canal, the Second had massive canal ponds and weirs along the system, created for shipyards, dry docks, mill races, and docks and ports, not to mention closely knit residential neighbourhoods nearby. Now, mostly abandoned, the locks were seen as dirty and dangerous, and the public advocated to fill in any unnecessary remaining canal infrastructure.

As early as 1916, City Council requested to infill four ponds along the route:

“March 14, 1916

Dear Sir,

The City Council of the City of St. Catharines passed a resolution to request from you the permission to fill in and beautify certain waste lands and ponds along the Old Welland Canal more particularly described as follows: –

1. St. John’s Pond – being on the easterly side of the Old Welland Canal above Lock 2. This consists of three or four islands with lagoons of water between, which water becomes stagnant at certain seasons of the year. This could be filled to create three acres of land suitable for a small park or playground and would beautify the surroundings of the Canal at this point without in any way interfering with the channel.
2. The Shickluna Pond – situated in the immediate vicinity of the St. Paul Street high level bridge recently constructed. This pond was formerly part of a shipyard and has long since passed into disuse.
3. A marsh to the southerly side of the Old Welland Canal and just below Lock 4. This has previously been used for dumping purposes and the marsh might be completely filled  to the benefit of the surrounding lands.
4. Malpasse’s pond – being on the southerly side of the Old Welland Canal and above Lock 4. This is a pond intercepted between the old Tow Path and the original bank of the creek.

With your consent the City would proceed to fill in these places with ashes, refuse, street cleanings, earth, etc. …in suitable seasons of the year to cause no offence to surrounding property and also to cause no interference with the Old canal proper and all to be done to the satisfaction of your Superintendent.

We respectfully urge you to give this matter your early consideration as we are desirous of creating beauty spots of these localities and appearance of the Old Welland Canal as well as to the City of St. Catharines.

Yours very truly, W.B. Burgoyne, Mayor”⁴

Due to the water levels then being used to generate hydroelectricity at Decew Falls, and for the remaining industries on that section of the canal (Kinlieth Paper and Welland Vale Companies), the city at that time was only allowed to fill in Section C (#3):

“Section C – some low marsh land below Lock 4. This is not used by the city as a general dumping ground. We have notices up prohibiting dumping of garbage, refuse, etc., but notwithstanding some individuals use it as a dump. At present it is very unsightly, and I think it would be advisable to allow the city to fill this area in. The land is low, but it affords no pondage to Lock 3 level. It would require several years to fill it in. The city should be required to fill it in as quickly as possible and cover the whole with earth. It is doubtful whether this could ever be used for park purposes as it is not in a very desirable neighbourhood.

L.D. Hara, Superintendent, 1916.”⁵

Throughout the early 1900s, as the city’s (both in St. Catharines and in Merritton before and after amalgamation) infrastructure expanded, the canal channel was used for storm water management. Sometime in the 1950s, the canal between Locks 13 and 17 were buried, culverting the rushing water underneath today’s Mountain Locks Park and Glendale Avenue. So vital is the channel for this purpose, that concrete sills were installed on top of the upbound sides of the locks to stem any erosion and destabilization from the constant flow of water, and to secure it to the prisms in storm surges. The banks of the channel, in some spots have also been reinforced for this purpose.

While the canal still fulfills the important water management role it was built for all those years ago, the value of the channel is been relegated to its original nickname: “Mr. Merritt’s Ditch.”

If then, your childhood was filled with stories of using the canal as a dump, and if your friends and neighbours also viewed the old canal as a dump, a sewer, or a ditch, in what possible positive light or value for heritage could anyone in the community view the canal? Those generational attitudes have persisted, and in the face of foul smells, piles of garbage, and safety hazards, how could we expect anything else from our forebears but a negative attitude about the old canals, which has persisted all these years.

Watch for Part Four of this series: “Change Management” coming November 25, 2024

Catch part one and two of the series:

Part One: Apathy and Indifference

Part Two: The Modern City

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

1. Letter, W.A. Bowden to L.D. Hara, October 29, 1915. STCM 2017.19. ↩︎
2. John N. Jackson and Sheila M. Wilson. St. Catharines: Canada’s Canal City. St. Catharines: St. Catharines Standard Limited, 1992. 235. ↩︎
3. Editorial, Toronto Star Weekly, June 22, 1929. As found in This Colossal Project by Roberta Styran and Robert Taylor. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2015. 217. ↩︎
4. Letter, Mayor W.B. Burgoyne to W.A. Bowden, March 14, 1916. STCM 2017.19. ↩︎
5. Report, L.D. Hara, to W.A. Bowden, May 25, 1916. STCM 2017. 19. ↩︎