The fate of the locktender’s house
Our old photo this week documents a drama that was playing out in Welland Vale in March 1943.
The building in the photo is a locktender’s house which had stood there for more than a century, next to Lock 2 of the second Welland Canal. The building of locktenders’ houses like this one had resulted from a proposal made by the canal’s chief engineer back in 1846: That henceforth the canal authorities should provide the men in charge of operating the canal’s locks with housing near the locks they had charge of, “built of good rubble masonry in a substantial manner with cut quoins sills and lintels …”
And that is what you see here — a solid building, right next to Lock 2, one-and-ahalf storeys high, built of the kind of reddish-brown stone used locally for other notable 19th-century buildings, including Merritton Town Hall and St. Thomas’ Anglican Church. The building seems to be a duplex, and may have housed not only the locktender but also the bridge tender responsible for a swing bridge located just south of that same canal lock.
In our old photo, workmen in the foreground are busy removing the east wall of Lock 2 while in the background preparations are being made to demolish the locktender’s house. But why?
By the time this photo was taken, work had been going on for more than a year on the installation of a huge new hydro generator at Decew Falls, next to the original 1898 Decew Falls facility. That project was the result of increased demand for hydroelectric power then, in the midst of the Second World War. Its completion would greatly add to the volume of water already being channelled from Decew on down Twelve Mile Creek to Lake Ontario. To accommodate that, Twelve Mile Creek would have to be widened, deepened and straightened along much of its course.
At Welland Vale the existing channel would have to be widened, and among other things, that would require the removal of the lock wall on the east side of the long-disused Lock 2 as well as removal of the adjacent locktender’s house.
When you go out to that site today you can still see the west wall of the original lock, lying partially beneath the presentday bridge across Welland Vale Island (a bridge built in the mid-1950s). All you see on the east side of the channel today is a thick stand of trees at the bottom of the slope that used to be right behind the locktender’s house.
If you want to get a better idea of what those old locktenders’ houses looked like, there are still a couple of them left. They’ve been converted into handsome residences, on Bradley Street in Merritton, which runs past the six closely spaced locks that used to take the second Welland Canal up the escarpment to Thorold.