Taming the Grand River — barely
In English, the phrase “Mother Nature” dates back almost 500 years and just like some mothers, Mother Nature is not always caring and loving.
That thought came to mind in February when I was in Cambridge-Galt on the day the ice jam broke. Although I missed the Grand River’s actual surge by 12 hours, enough remained to imply that a sullen Mother Nature had shown off vengeful power. Grand tantrums are nothing new — early Galt histories and memoirs record numerous springtime disasters.
Adam Ainslie’s 1889 autobiography “On Life’s Stage” recalls February 1849, when an ice jam broke and “an enormous avalanche of ice came over the dam.” His perch on the nearby mill bridge was wisely abandoned and Adam ran along the bank, arriving just as the Main Street bridge was swept away. He saw “Dr. Richardson running for his life to the east end and the bridge giving way at his very heels. That bridge crashed into the lower bridge [at today’s Concession Street] and carried it off as well.”
James Young’s 1880 “Reminiscences of the Early History of Galt” notes another flood just five years later. It was March 16, 1854, when both the mill bridge and a new Main Street bridge floated away. Then, four years after that, on March 18, 1858, the Main Street bridge was destroyed for a third time. Jim Quantrell’s essay in “A Part of Our Past” lists year after year when severe flooding occurred.
Following the infamous $5million flood disaster in 1974, Grand River Conservation Authority and the City of Cambridge developed a strategy to thwart future floods. One measure was erecting protective berms on each river bank. Joleen Taylor described this followup project in “The Flood of 1974 and the Architecture Lost” in 2015’s Waterloo Historical Society publication.
As I stood on the Park Hill bridge a month ago watching the still-surging waters and floes crashing over the dam, those long-ago stories came to mind: once again history was teaching lessons.
Perhaps metamorphosing the river a bit too much, I fantasized that the Grand had grown resentful since those tall berms had gone up. Although the 2018 ice rampage didn’t quite breach the barriers, the sight of those threefoot thick, truck-sized ice floes within inches of the top of the berm was a reminder that one more big rainfall or slightly warmer temperatures a day earlier may well have triggered such a breach. As Ainslie wrote, overall “it was a grand sight” and I doubt the 82-year-old Scot was being punny.
This week’s photos capture two flood scenes from nine decades ago. The 1929 postcard view looks east from Main and Water streets, a.k.a. Bankers’ Corner. Someone who previously owned this card wrote a brief recollection of floods in his or her lifetime on the back: “... that’s what the flood used to be like on Main Street but it was more exciting on Water Street and still more exciting if you were on the bridge ... they once had rowboats on Water Street during the floods.”
The second photograph is dated Feb. 22, 1930, and lets us look north along Water Street South. Matthew Kirkwood was general manager of the Lake Erie & Northern Electric Railway, and it is his writing on this photo that adds extra meaning. Look at the thickness of the ice-floe overflow on Water Street! Underneath are tracks over which Matthew’s freight trains must run to service industries on the west side of the river. The West Side Spur ran from Water Street near Walter and across the river to the West Bank. (The centre pillar holding up the modern pedestrian bridge was part of that railway bridge.)
Kirkwood’s railway company hired many extra hands to clear the ice and it took a couple of days to get the trains operating along that stretch of Galt’s core.
Lessons learned from the past prevented a 2018 ice flood ... and, for the present, the Grand River rests.