The Welland Canals and Their Communities: Engineering, Industrial, and Urban Transformation (review)

The Welland Canals and Their Communities: Engineering, Industrial, and Urban Transformation, by John N. Jackson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Pp. xvi+535; illustrations, maps, figures, tables, bibliography, index. $70.

Canals diffuse technological innovation by spreading maritime economies inland. As ships cross through a world of wagons and oxcarts, hamlets evolve from landlocked farm towns to linked industrial centers. New social and economic opportunities forever change community life. In exploring these transformations, John N. Jackson warns readers by way of preface that he is writing "urban historical geography." His purpose is to understand stages of industrial modernization. Canals, he maintains, are "urban catalysts" that dictate settlement patterns and drive historical change.

This is ground well known to Jackson, the author of more than a dozen books and reports on the Welland Canals. Completed in 1829, the first Welland Canal was Canada's alternative to New York's Erie Canal. Like the Erie, it opened a vast hinterland by providing a navigation link from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie that bypassed Niagara Falls. Its boosters and engineers embraced the canal craze of the 1820s with the same enthusiasm for monumental construction that had fired factory industrialization in eighteenth-century Britain and France. French engineer Sebastien Vauban had advocated a cut across the Niagara Peninsula as early as 1699. British engineer Thomas Telford was intrigued enough to become an investor. It was the Erie Canal, however, that spurred the Welland idea with its challenge to the inland empire once commanded by Montreal. New Yorkers contributed labor and the technical expertise of frontier builders such as James Geddes. Locally, mill owner William Hamilton Merritt provided the impetus. Merritt's greatest contribution was quite accidental: a rough survey that underestimated the height of the summit by half. Had it not been for this and other "fortuitous acts of fate" (a term the author uses to imply the serendipity of technological progress), it is doubtful that investors would have shouldered the risk. But with luck and determination the Welland Company surmounted a 337-foot ridge with thirty-nine locks to build the steepest canal in the world.

Canadian pride and New York canal competition drove the investment in bigger locks and a deeper cut that extended the Welland to Port Colborne on Lake Erie in 1833. Eventually rebuilt by the government of Canada, the Welland became a freight route for sailing ships and steamers at a time when the narrow Erie remained limited to barge traffic. Each enlargement in the Welland system--a second canal in 1845, a third in 1887, a fourth in 1933, a link to the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959--remade the Niagara Peninsula into a "linked urban-industrial complex" built around four inland ports (p. 327). Enormous ship locks nearly twice as tall as the Gutun locks in Panama were an engineering marvel in the 1920s, a tourist attraction even then. Tourism and recreation helped sustain the urban corridor long after the St. Lawrence Seaway abandoned the Welland in 1972.

So powerful was the canal as a juggernaut of urbanization that it moves through Jackson's story like a force unto itself. The Welland, we learn, altered military policy and ship architecture. It brought Irish labor and Roman Catholicism as well as flour mills, saw mills, coal furnaces, hydropower, road and rail networks, place names honoring the canal's benefactors, and four new industrial towns. Competition became interdependence across the Niagara border. Regional economies fused. "As milling, shipbuilding, paper making, engineering, and later the automobile and auto-parts industries each used items from other manufacturers, there emerged," writes Jackson, "not only a large number of specialized establishments, but a complex and integrated system of industrial inter-linkage that together created an energetic industrial complex along the Welland Canals Corridor" (p. 483).

Historians of technology may balk at the supposition that canals--not people or politics or cultural values...