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The following is exerpted from This Great National Object by Roberta M. Styran and Robert R. Taylor.
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.” 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 the very few great ship canals of the world.
(…)
The saga of the construction of the nineteenth-century Welland Canals is long and complex, involving thousands of men (and animals) from 1824 to the 1880s, and documenting the progress from simple picks and shovels to steam-powered earth-moving machines. It is a tale of changing ship-building and construction technology and of increasingly sophisticated building materials from timber to stone to concrete. Among its protagonists are wind and rain, ice and blazing summer heat, floods and landslides, jolts to the existing social order, and shocking accident and violent death. It is set in the context of dramatic political and economic change in the Niagara peninsula and on the national and international stage. Moreover, its immutable technological and geological challenges had to be met by fallible human beings. And so the story of the canals’ construction grants us many glimpses into the characters and personalities of the men who built the waterway – the unskilled labourers, the talented artisans, the self-trained or formally educated engineers, the harassed or inventive contractors, and ultimately the conscientious – and not so conscientious – bureaucrats.
In other words, the Welland Canals’ construction is more than a simple account of digging an increasingly large ditch to enable increasingly large ships to bypass the physical obstacle of Niagara Falls. It is many stories, interweaving hope and despair, triumph and defeat, humour and violence, generosity and selfishness … a reflection of the whole human comedy.
Book Launch – St. Catharine’s, ON
May 12, 1pm at the St Catharine’s Museum
1932 Welland Canals Pkwy. (formerly Government Road)
St. Catharines, ON, L2R 7K6
Sponsored by the Canadian Canal Society
To learn more about This Great National Object or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
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