Downtown Aultsville, N 44.57.15 W 75.01.42, Aultsville Ontario
infrastructure | consequences by louis helbig
photography history inundation
foundations of houses and barns, the subtle curves of roads, the shadows of bridges, the oval of a quarter-mile horse track, locks with gates closed or ajar, the outlines of entire towns. The beauty and solemnity of what is under the St Lawrence between Prescott and Cornwall is primordial, instinctual and universal. Rising water finds ample space in our creation myths: Noah’s Ark, Turtle Mountain or Atlantis. The sunken villages are equal to any narrative of annihilating flood anywhere real or imagined. On the route between Upper and Lower Canada, and between Canada and the United States, they were amongst some of Canada’s oldest European settlements. In New France, LaSalle built a fur trading post at the base of the Long Sault Rapids (which became Dickinson’s Landing), its cultural influence in the large Franco-Ontarian population in eastern Ontario. Loyalists settled here in the 1780s, in the War of 1812 local militia, allied with Mohawk warriors in support of the British, successfully defended themselves and a nascent Canadian identity against a much larger American force. Crysler’s Farm, the site of one of the most important battles and victories to define Canada’s modern existence, lies with the sunken villages, presided over by a ‘wandering’ official monument first erected in 1895 at the battlefield and then re-erected, in the late 1950s, on higher ground nowhere near it. The intersection of King’s Highway No. 2 and Aultsville Road, downtown Aultsville, Ontario.The outline of businesses and homes can clearly be seen along both sides of both roads. Originally established in 1787 by five disbanded soldiers from the King’s Royal Regiment Loyalists, the village was named after Samuel Ault, a descendant of one of the original five who sat in Canada’s first parliament in 1867. Of the 6,500 people displaced when the St Lawrence Seaway was flooded about 400 were from Aultsville.
sacrifice memory
the lost villages
In the St Lawrence River lie the sunken villages – Maple Grove, Mille Roches, Moulinette, Sheek’s Island, Wales, Dickinson’s Landing, Santa Cruz, Woodlands, Farran’s Point and Aultsville. Sixty-five hundred people once lived in these places, now under a 50km stretch of water. They lived and loved, worked and played, were born and were buried; little different, in their time, than people in any other Canadian community. Little different, save for the misfortune to be near the mighty Long Sault Rapids, a significant barrier between the ocean and the Great Lakes. As part of the modern St Lawrence Seaway project, between 1954 and the 1958 explosion of a coffer-dam, broadcast on national radio on Dominion Day, the rapids were drained. All the small towns near the rapids were dismantled, sometimes moved in bits and pieces, trees cut down and the remainder burnt or bulldozed before the St Lawrence was flooded. The water rose over three days and nights, the inundation was absolute; the water murky and opaque covered all from sight, except in a few places where one could, and still can, wander knee-deep down old streets. I had known nothing of this until September 2009, when from my little airplane I saw the oddest thing: the familiar pattern of a house foundation in a most unfamiliar place, the blue-green water of the St Lawrence. Very real, and very surreal, scattered here and there under clear, aquamarine water were stark
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