all of which linger on under one name or another. Dams, locks, entire new towns were invented. Ingleside and Long Sault, the epitome of modern planning and design, were built to absorb the displaced of the villages. Iroquois was entirely uprooted, moved and rebuilt, as was one third of Morrisburg. The best-known institution is Upper Canada Village, prominent, publicly funded, where re-enactors celebrate the mid-nineteenth century in period costume by tending chickens, pigs and gardens and populating old houses and barns salvaged during Seaway construction. Next to Upper Canada Village a commemoration of the lost villages, a sequence of low-slung brick walls with embedded gravestones removed from the villages, gets scant attention. The forgetting might lie, in good part, with how the institutions spawned by the Seaway treat the sunken villages. The villages have visually reappeared thanks to an unintended consequence of the project, the incredible filtering capacity of invasive zebra mussels. With their reappearance, it becomes clear just how much the story of the villages and their inhabitants has also been filtered, selectively, in support of an official record. Whenever the sunken villages are mentioned on the occasional official placard, they are cast in the supporting role of a glorious, grand narrative of industrial progress and enlightened public policy. Two examples jump out: we see photographs of houses perched on house moving machines from New Jersey; the accompanying captions tell how these were moved, with great public approval, without so much as disturbing the crockery in the cupboards – nothing about the people in them or the community left behind. The second example is of houses being deliberately set on fire, but this too was okay – these acts were instrumental in the study and perfection of smoke alarms that now serve the public good. One senses a palpable unease, maybe even guilt, about the villages, that they do not quite fit, even 50 years later, with what is institutionalised, official and publicly- funded. Some people were, most certainly, upset by the destruction of their homes, communities, livelihoods and landscape, but seen from today’s perspective, it is remarkable how little resistance there was. It was a heady time. Local businesses and community organisations called themselves – and still do – Seaway this or that, and the whole area is now known as the Seaway Valley. The sense of loss was, it appears, salved by a combination of being part of some larger national purpose, the promise of industrial development, wealth and employment, and individual material benefits such as new housing. Social pressure to accept this was immense. Local prosperity never arrived, local promises were never fulfilled. Cornwall never became the industrial centre once considered inevitable. Today, the only industrial reality, adjacent to the old Cornwall Canal, is a vacant area where a Domtar pulp mill and a C-I-L chemical plant once stood. Iroquois, once slated to become one of Canada’s textile manufacturing centres, had its small Dominion Textile plant close in the 1990s.
As the local chapters of the seductive Canadian narrative have dissolved with time, so to have the national chapters. None have ended as anticipated. The Seaway never achieved what was envisioned of it. Following the precedent set by the earlier canals and locks of obsolescence by technological change, the Seaway cannot handle the massive container ships that now carry much of the world’s commerce. Its tonnage peaked well shy of its intended capacity in the 1970s and has declined, more or less, ever since. Only the Moses-Saunders dam and its hydro-generation station have lived up to its promise, generating about 3% of Ontario’s electrical power, albeit little of that consumed locally. The narrative of progress and industrial prosperity explains the impetus behind the construction of the Seaway. The hoped-for ending – that Shangri-La of endless jobs and wealth – is so crucial to that story that it still seems impossible at an official level to admit that what was hoped for and promised was largely not achieved. That the people of the Sunken Villages paid the highest price is even more inconvenient. It is a circular story: unable to reconcile its inconsistencies for doing so undermines its initial premise, the inconsistencies are glossed over, and the truth and anything we might learn from this story is largely discarded. We are left to other devices to understand the continued relevance, meaning and importance of the sunken villages – universal myths of destruction and creation might provide a more satisfactory insight into the project and the Villages than the official record. However, the official record is not the only record and universal mythology not the only credible touchstone. There are thousands of personal stories; intimate personal accounts, first, second or even third-person, alive within living memory or already transmitted across one or even two generations. Pay attention to these, listen and learn, and the curtain rises on a drama, as real, contradictory, nuanced and meaningful as anywhere; indeed, perhaps more meaningful than most. The very finality of the inundation, gives the stories a twist, a particular time, a particular event, a clear before and after by which to understand what was and what, since July 1, 1958, now is. Personal stories are more than simple animation, the colouring-in of 1950s black and white photos of streets, rows of trees, locks and farms. The stories are rarely sentimental; there is nothing of the saccharine gauze through which present culture commonly peers back into the past. Though there is anger, which certainly shreds sentiment, the real antidote to shallow sentiment and its cohorts of superficiality and half-truth is just how real, unflinching, human and universal memories are. There is a lot to learn here.
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