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 4: Change Management

To say “people hate change” is not revelatory. Most scholars agree that this fear of change comes from a threat to our comfort zones, and a fear of the unknown. When you live through change (technological, developmental, economical, and societal) you might hold on to the old attitudes that shape your world view.

Anecdotally and culturally, the old attitudes about the old canals that held true for so long are slowly changing. Since their respective closures and abandonments each canal transitioned the locks overnight from vital national and international economic links and marvels of engineering to obscure, outdated, dirty, and dangerous eyesores. Yet, the community also longed for their preservation. Several studies and council reports identified the need to do something throughout the last 70 years, but action has was never taken.

The best analogy that we in 2024 might be able to identify with is the abandonment of old rail lines, especially in urban areas where the level crossings at major intersections are left as little railway islands, disconnected from the network already torn up, waiting for that intersection to be repaved eventually. One day, not so long ago, the line was important to local business, the next it is overgrown by weeds. Eventually, it’s torn up and the adjacent land filled in, slowly erasing that bit of economic and urban history that local history buffs crave to better understand.

The source and persistence of the documented negative attitudes towards the old canals is difficult to pin since explaining historical motivations is never easy. But certainly, safety and sanitation were core to the requests to fill in sections of the canal.

That they were too far gone and became eyesores, meant that there was little opposition to their burial.

But why couldn’t the old canals enjoy a “retirement”? Why were they swept away when they had once brought the city a reputation of industrial success?

“A fall of more than three hundred feet…is such as probably no country in the world can equal in a similar space. And there is no doubt that considerable manufacturing towns will eventually spring up on the canal. The unlimited supply of waterpower for turning machinery…offer advantages such as few places in the province possess for similar undertakings.”¹

“Without the Welland Canal the Dominion would be little more than a home for cats and badgers.”²

“Yet the general public was fascinated by the canal-building project and flocked both from within Niagara and from abroad to inspect or tour the site…Many were the groups which the engineers herded along the Ship Canal construction site in tours from 1914-1932. Weller began this tradition…organizing tours for groups such as the… Canadian Society of Civil Engineers… In the twenties, the range of groups extended to the Boy Scouts of Port Dalhousie.”³

For those unfamiliar with the term, a sense of place describes our relationships with places, expressed in different dimensions of human life, including emotions, histories, imagination, stories, and individual experiences. It conceptualizes how we perceive a place and the meanings we ascribe to them, which make up our identities, attachments, and interdependence with our communities.

As people in the past had to deal with change, we do as well. To watch the tangible environment morph into something unrecognizable can be debilitating to our sense of place. History, tangible landmarks, character, and “charm” mix with familiarity and functionality to inform perceptions and beliefs. If we believe a place we know to be beautiful and loved, then imagine something – an abandoned canal, for example – challenges that belief.

For over one hundred years, the sense of place for many in St. Catharines was linked to the achievements of the Welland Canal and the success of its associated industries, not to the locks themselves. As we’ve seen throughout this series, when the canals were abandoned by business, they were also abandoned at every level of government, and at all levels of society.

The public’s understanding and appreciation of infrastructure as heritage was not what it is today. The Ontario Heritage Act, for example, was only introduced in 1975. Only a handful of museums in Ontario were founded before 1950. Until the 1980s, there was not any significant attempt to conserve any of the old canals, and any previous suggestions to do so were usurped by economic crises (like the Great Depression). In the 1980s, considerable energy was dedicated to archaeological excavations of Lock 1 and Lock 24 of the First Welland Canals, significantly improving our understanding of its construction and operation. Two organizations attempted conservation and designation efforts through the 1980s and 1990s, spawning educational programs, events, and festivals to raise awareness and support of those efforts. A handful of reports on how to preserve the old locks, along with business cases and tourism studies were generated, but still resulted in little action.

This slow depreciation of heritage structures is not unique to St. Catharines or Canada. Associated with the forward momentum of human nature (and influenced by modern disposable capitalism) “old stuff” is sometimes chucked away if it no longer serves its original purpose. Retrofit to handle storm water but otherwise lost to the overgrown trees and shrubs, parkland, and urban residential development, the old canals slowly – over decades and decades – have fallen from public view and consciousness. We often hear about the Merritton Locks: “I didn’t even know this was in here, and I live here!” Their modern conservation and care, a hundred years after they were last productive and generated any revenue, is estimated to be too much for any small community to bear (the Welland Canal has never been cheap).

Regardless of cost estimates, or feasibility studies, or business cases, what happened to the old canal is just part of the circle of life of a city, also referred to as “the cycle of development.” Every generation has struggled to mark the importance of the canal by maintaining its upkeep. Even Merritt admitted that it was hard work for a community to take on so large a project in the first place: “We are ever inclined to move the burden from our shoulders, and we can only blame ourselves…I mention this…more particularly as a most unfounded idea is entertained not only among ourselves…that the cause of our negligence and inattention to the improvement of the country originates from the Government of the colony…”⁴

Niche Everyone’s History

For canal buffs, the canal is layered in story and mystery. It’s not only about ships, or sailors, or lock tenders, but also about the industry and growth injected into St. Catharines by the canal. It is not only about the Queenston limestone, or dimensions of the lock chambers, or naavies that built them, but also about the source of pride once felt by the community. It can feel a bit niche and jargon-filled when one of us goes off on a tangent about sluiceways and waste weirs, but regardless of the condition of the locks today, or in 1916 (when the filling-in began), the role of the Welland Canal in forming our sense of place is undeniable.

For the community, the canal is more than its construction timeline, Mr. Merritt, or the goods and supplies that were sent up the system to open settlement in the west. Its complex history is built on a foundation of family lore, reconstruction and abandonment, lifelong curiosity, and grateful appreciation (or annoyance depending on how you feel about the road network and bridges) of its role in shaping our neighbourhoods.

As the community embarks on the implementation of a new interpretive plan along the old canal corridor, and a full slate of celebrations in advance and during the bicentennial of the opening of the First Welland Canal in 1829, we begin a new chapter in the history of the old canals. It is our turn and opportunity to change the answer to the question: what happened to the old canals?

Read the entire series:

Part One: Apathy and Indifference

Part Two: The Modern City

Part Three: The Dumping Ground

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

1. Editorial by W.H. Smith, 1951. As found in The Welland Canals and Their Communities by John N. Jackson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. 80. ↩︎
2. Editorial, St. Catharines Journal, 1872. ↩︎
3. Roberta Styran and Robert Taylor. This Colossal Project. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2015. 231. ↩︎
4. 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. ↩︎