From transportation corridor to city park
Our old photo this week shows what the southwestern edge of downtown Thorold looked like in the early 20th century. A lot has changed since then.
In those days that part of town was dominated by two means of transportation — the NS&T railway system and the remains of the Second Welland Canal.
The photographer who took this photo (probably around 1915-1920) was standing somewhere near the corner of Ormond Street S. and Portland Street. The landscape was dominated there by the main channel of the Second Welland Canal and related bodies of water. At the time this photo was taken the Second Canal was already an historical relic, bypassed since the 1880s by the Third Welland Canal, which had followed a new channel a mile or so to the east.
Paralleling the canal at this point was the railway. Starting as the St. Catharines and Niagara Central Railway in the 1880s and taken over by the NS&T (Niagara, St. Catharines and Toronto) Railway in 1899, the railway had left its mark on the town by coming up the escarpment from Merritton, cutting across the north side of town, past the Thorold High School, across Ormond Street N. on a tall trestle, across Front Street on an enormous iron bridge, and then running behind the businesses on the west side of Front Street down to Sullivan Avenue, where passengers used the main train station and freight was handled at nearby freight sheds.
All of that lay in front of the photographer on the day he took this photo a century or more ago, while behind him the disused old canal meandered off to the south and the rail lines continued to a Y-junction, where trains for Niagara Falls swung off to the east and those for Fonthill and beyond headed west.
It took a long time for this double canal and rail transportation corridor to be removed from the centre of Thorold. The canal was finally filled in during the early 1960s, while the railway tracks remained until 1968. Then began the process of turning this southern section of the former canal and railway lands into the attractive green space that is there today – Battle of Beaverdams Park, extending from Sullivan Avenue on the north almost as far as Lyndon Street on the south.
The only hint today of the heavy railway presence that was once there is an NS&T historical plaque in front of the nearby Thorold Community Credit Union on Sullivan Avenue, where the train station used to stand. There are a couple of echoes of the former Second Welland Canal – most obviously, the outline of the stone walls of Lock 25 that emerge from the grass in front of the park’s bandshell, as well as the name of the thoroughfare that runs along part of the west side of the park – Towpath Street.