Almost a century and a half ago, engineer and historian William Kingsford wrote of the Welland Canal: “The history of this important work is so marvellous and so little known, to some extent even so misrepresented, that a consecutive narrative is indispensable, correctly to understand the vicissitudes through which it has passed. So far as the writer knows, no connected account of it exists.”¹ How little has changed since 1865! As canal historian Robert F. Legget observed in 1987: “The Welland Canal is still but little known to most Canadians, [despite the fact that] the Welland today is one of...

This 1842 tribute to William Hamilton Merritt, the first of many, was long in coming but richly deserved.¹ The saga of the Welland Canals’ construction may be said to have begun with Merritt as a twenty-year-old. On a summer night in 1812 a lonely rider patrolled the west bank of the Niagara River, which swirled below him. Young Lieutenant Merritt of the Second Lincoln Militia, in charge of forty soldiers, was well acquainted with the area between the village of Chippawa and Fort Erie in Upper Canada. On this night he and his companions were on the alert. His young...

Before ever a tree was felled, a sod turned, or a shovelful of soil removed, the canal planners had to determine a route for the Niagara canal. Given the challenges of swamps, forests, intractable ground, escarpments, east-west watercourses, and storm-battered coastlines, surveyors had difficulty choosing the most suitable line for an artificial channel across the peninsula. In addition, the interests of local landowners, businessmen, and the military had to be considered. While many early nineteenth-century settlers recognized the advantages of connecting lakes Ontario and Erie, no one route was an early favourite. Not surprisingly, the route finally decided on for...

Obviously, no canal could be built without the services of surveyors, engineers, and contractors.¹ While the land surveyors reported on possible routes, and the contractors were essential for managing the actual work, the role of the engineers was pivotal. They were responsible for laying out the lines that had been chosen, checking the soil conditions, dividing the work into sections, overseeing and measuring the contractors’ work and authorizing payments for work done, solving the many problems the contractors would encounter, and judging when a contract had been successfully completed. If the work was unsatisfactory, an engineer might be required to...

Anyone reading the letters, memoranda, and reports relating to the building of the First Welland Canal cannot help being struck by the optimism of William Hamilton Merritt and the Welland Canal Company. Time and again they expressed great confidence in the success of the Welland, echoing and reinforcing Merritt’s own faith in the future of the enterprise.

“Gentlemen,” said George Keefer on 30 November 1824 at the ceremonial sod-turning near New Holland (now Allanburg), “it is with pleasure that I remove the first earth from the Welland Canal, and ardently hope that the work may continue uninterrupted until the whole...

Once the land was clear and a route at least provisionally accepted, excavating the channel became the Welland Canal Company’s next priority. Most canals are more than just man-made ditches, however, because the terrain they cross is seldom all on the same level. So once “Mr. Merritt’s ditch” was underway, consideration had to be given to the important question of how to get ships up and down the change in elevation between lakes Ontario and Erie – especially the steep rise of the Niagara Escarpment. There were a number of possibilities, among which were tunnels and inclines, discussed above. The more...

The landscape into which the nineteenth-century Welland Canals were set could best be described as “waterous,” lying between two of the Great Lakes on a peninsula bounded by the wide Niagara River on the east and incised with many lesser watercourses, including Ten and Twelve Mile creeks, Lyons Creek, and the larger Chippawa Creek (Welland River). Countless other smaller streams scored this landscape – water was everywhere. Nevertheless the supply for the Welland was often problematic. William Hamilton Merritt’s original idea for a canal arose from his desire to replace the erratic water levels of Twelve Mile Creek with a steady...

In the early nineteenth century water routes were the preferred avenues for transport of goods and personal travel throughout Europe and North America. As elsewhere in developing Canadian communities, roads in the Niagara peninsula were few and far between. Hence William Hamilton Merritt and the Welland Canal Company directors were not overly concerned with obstructing east-west land traffic. Nevertheless, from the outset land crossings of the canal had to be allowed for. In fact the 1824 Act of Incorporation of the Welland Canal Company required that a “secure, sufficient, and commodious bridge, for the passing of carriages” would have to...

Public dissatisfaction with the Welland Canal among local residents and enterprises was often deeply felt and highly vocal. To manage community relations, engineers and their superiors had to employ diplomatic skills for which they had had no training. Not only were there controversies over the inconvenience of bridges and waterways, but established farms and businesses suffered in tangible ways. Although industry was attracted to the canal’s banks, millowners could find that their plans were thwarted if the new waterway did not meet their commercial needs.

In some ways, the most intractable obstacles to face the canal planners and engineers were...

A tour of the construction sites of the first three canals would have shown great mounds of earth, heaps of stone, clouds of dust, fields of mud, teams of oxen or horses, assorted equipment ranging from simple wagons to complex steam-powered shovels – and scores, often hundreds, of human beings. When describing the excavation of the trench or the building of the locks, we have occasionally referred to the labourers, but who were these unskilled navvies wielding picks and axes? Who were the more skilled men who later manoeuvred the giant shovels? Who were the men who would emerge from twelve-or...

Working on the Welland Canal was difficult, even occasionally life-threatening, as we have seen. The navvies, however, had other struggles, some of their own making, others beyond their control. The abuse of alcohol, endemic in the society at large, made their lives even more unstable. The Irish labourers – and later the Italians – brought their own issues with them to Niagara. Their internecine feuds, which often led to violent encounters, were not mitigated by the prejudices of the local population. Canal and governmental authorities were both flummoxed as to how to deal with canal-side poverty, disease, and criminality, for much of...

In this book, we have chronicled the experiences of the men who built and rebuilt a great canal “on the ground” – the challenges, frustrations, and triumphs of engineers, contractors, artisans, and navvies. As the visionary instigator of the project, William Hamilton Merritt has been granted a prime role in this saga, but we have also shown that politicians, soldiers, businessmen, and local worthies all saw this waterway connecting lakes Ontario and Erie as contributing to the increase in prosperity of British North America – and, not coincidentally, to their own fortunes. In particular, entrepreneurs, both local and from farther afield, profited...