All images are from the Sunken Villages - Canada’s Atlantis in the St Lawrence River series.
Lock 25 Galop and Old Canals, N 44.50.32 W 75.18.25, Iroquois, Ontario, Canada The old and new locks of the Galop Canal, initially built in 1845 and then expanded and rebuilt in 1897 when, at 800 feet in length, they became the longest locks in Canada. This set of locks were replaced by Lock 7 of the St Lawrence Seaway. Iroquois itself was moved one mile to the north from its previous location adjacent to the river and the Galop Canal.
It requires little counterfactual imagination to understand what the consequences of losing the Battle of Crysler’s Farm would have meant. Montreal would have been sacked, the tie between Upper and Lower Canada would have been severed and Canada, as we know it today, would likely not exist. Yet the site was summarily buried, shuffled into obscurity. For about as long as Europeans knew about the Great Lakes there were schemes to connect them with each other and the Atlantic. The Long Sault Rapids, through which the entire St Lawrence tumbled 30 feet over 3 miles, volumes greater than Niagara Falls, and Niagara itself, were the biggest barriers blocking these fresh water seas from their salt-water brethren. In the 1840s, and again in the 1890s, canals and locks were built to skirt the rapids and their permanent clouds of mist. Alas, each was obsolete before it was finished for none could keep pace with the increasing size of sea-going vessels. The Cornwall and Galop canals and locks lie in the company of the villages, some clearly visible, others too deep to see. Twentieth century plans to link the lakes with the St Lawrence were made and remade; on the Canadian side the project became an increasingly nationalistic one, a focus of institutional imperative, a manifestation of progress and modernity, a triumph
of man over nature, an awe-inspiring achievement that would, with utter certainly, generate boundless new industry, wealth and prosperity. The plan was a child of its time in an era enamoured of mega-projects – the Americans had their Tennessee Valley Authority and Hoover Dam, the Soviets were working on their Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature which eventually drained the Aral Sea. It was Canada’s turn in ‘Canada’s Century’ to create its own eighth wonder of the world. And a wonder it was. Thirty-five thousand acres of prime land were flooded. The project morphed to include three dams, the Iroquois, the Long Sault control dam and the larger Moses- Saunders hydro dam between Cornwall, Ontario and Massena, New York. Forty thousand men worked to complete the project in what today is an unimaginable four years. It cost an unheard of billion dollars. Postage stamps were issued, textbooks printed throughout the Commonwealth to teach children about this achievement, newspapers and radio reported breathlessly, and a young and beautiful Queen Elizabeth officially opened it with President Eisenhower in 1959. Being Canadian and bi-national, the project spawned a plethora of official institutions – a Seaway commission, a bridge corporation, a parks commission, a power generation authority,
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