Shoemaker Lake’s man-made storage partner

The Great Depression still had a job stranglehold on Kitchener in 1937.

However, a “Men Wanted” sign was posted by Dunker Construction Company after the Kitchener Water Commission awarded the firm a $32,000 contract in May.

Dunker’s task? Excavate a large hole near the end of Shoemaker Avenue, build a waterproof concrete box then cover it up. No one rushed to see what had been built; no one noticed any effect of the construction; and no one oohed and aahed over the design. Thanks to a few surviving 1937 photographs we can appreciate those things now.

This was Kitchener’s third water reservoir — fifth, counting two vertical standpipes — and the second at Shoemaker Lake. Tucked away just beyond the western end of Homer Watson Boulevard, Shoemaker Lake is the only natural lake within Berlin/ Kitchener’s traditional boundaries. Dating from the ice age, the kettle lake is named after Jacob D. Shoemaker (1799-1902), an early settler who lived from the 1830s until 1902 on his Lot 19, German Company Tract.

Busy Berlin’s rapid growth in the late 19th-century required a dependable water supply and in 1887 council invited an American firm, Moffatt and Hodgins, to create Berlin Waterworks Company. The contract called for welldrilling around Shoemaker Lake, building a pumping station, laying six miles of mains and erecting a metal standpipe on St. George Street.

For 10 years BWC supplied the town’s needs. In times of drought, raw lake water was added to the system — causing complaints of turbid water containing various loathsome elements. By 1898, Berlin had purchased the system and added a million-gallon fresh water reservoir in 1913 at Shoemaker Lake; a second pumping station and above-ground tank on Strange Street in 1922; new wells around the city; and a second vertical water tower on Duke Street at Stahl Avenue.

Kitchener’s water demand was insatiable. What if there was a major pumping breakdown or rainfall vagaries such the 1936 summer drought? More backup was needed, thus the second Shoemaker Lake reservoir.

Excavation by Dunker’s began in late May 1937; forms were erected early in June; concrete floor and sides poured in June and July; columns and roof completed in August. Following a few weeks of hardening, cleaning and sterilizing, the two-million-gallon reservoir was connected by pipe to the older 1913 reservoir.

Kitchener’s reserves were now doubled as the new Dunker reservoir was merged in the city system with the million-gallon steel tank at Strange Street and the original Shoemaker reservoir. One year later, KWC awarded Dunker’s another contract for a $40,000 reservoir at the corner of Guelph and Lancaster streets to complement a new well at Guelph Street and Spring Valley Road.

In the early 1970s water supply became a regional government responsibility and by the 1990s both the well and the Lancaster reservoir were disconnected. The latter is now a large, dry-storage area for the City of Kitchener. That Guelph well, known in engineers’ parlance as K41, served from 1938 until 1991. It was just recently completely decommissioned because Highway 7’s new configuration will be so close that it could never be put back into service.

The Shoemaker Lake reservoirs, 1913 and 1937, remain vital parts of the region’s water system. Franklyn Smith, supervisor of water infrastructure management, says they were “very well designed, very well built and very well maintained over the years which is why they have remained in service so long.”

To the Region of Waterloo, the pumping complex is Greenbrook, named after a nearby street; to the City of Kitchener and neighbours the locale is Lakeside Park. But for me, who grew up in the area, the site (lake and grounds) remains Shoemaker Lake. In part, it’s my ongoing protest at a city decision 50 years ago that stripped the historic pioneer name Shoemaker from the road that ran from Mill Street to Shoemaker Lake. Sterling Avenue (spelt that way until 1942) had been built across King East in the 19-teens and later extended as far as Courtland Avenue. When a 1967 bridge connected it to Shoemaker Avenue at Mill Street, the historically-meaningless name Stirling was assigned to the whole route.

The name Sterling originally honoured a city in Virginia, U.S.A. Go figure!

CAM DUNKER PHOTOS On June 17, 1937 shovels were deep into the ground beside Shoemaker Lake in Kitchener. Dunker Construction was excavating more than 15,000 cubic yards of earth near the waterworks pumping station, which can be seen in the background at left.

“Like a thickly populated forest” is how the Daily Record reporter described the scene in mid-July 1937. Steel rods and wooden concrete forms rise from the floor of the Kitchener Water Commission’s new reservoir.