A digital lens on the Welland Canal
Historic maps of waterway now available at the click of a mouse
It’s a view of the Welland Canal and its history that hasn’t been seen before.
For the first time the history of all four iterations of the canal — from the early 19th century to present — can be viewed at a glance. The path of the canals, the locks, and the remains of the past hidden by vegetation and the changes to St. Catharines’s geography wrought by time can be found with a click of a mouse.
“It’s the first time anything like this has been done,” said Colleen Beard, Brock University’s head of the map, data and GIS library. “It is a new way to breathe life into history.”
Beard is behind the online Historic Welland Canals Mapping Project, which took historic maps tucked away in the university archives, contemporary photos and online map-
ping tools to create a comprehensive view of the canals.
At the core of the project, said Beard, is the digitization of historic maps going back to the earliest days of the first Welland Canal.
Having digital copies of old maps allowed Beard to create a series of overlays which allows a user to see these historic documents on top of current maps.
Someone can now see the past and the present at the same, she said.
A person using the online tool can lay an aerial photo from 1921 over a current photo of the city, for example, creating an at-a-glance glimpse of how much St. Catharines and the canals have changed.
But the mapping project was more than just laying old maps and aerial photos over modern ones. Beard wanted the project to be a guide to local history that is useful to both citizens and their government.
So she travelled the routes of all four canals on bicycle and on foot, clambering through brush and dodging some local wildlife, to examine and photograph the remains of the past.
Many of the bits and pieces of the first, second and third canals are overgrown and hidden from view unless you know where to look. The online map she’s created lays out the path of the old canals and shows the view where critical pieces of now unused infrastructure are tucked away.
“Some of them are in really bad shape and are starting to really degrade,” she said.
Beard hopes by building an easy explorable catalogue of these historic pieces of old locks and other remains of the canals it will spur the City of St. Catharines to take steps to preserve them.
Beard said the installation of the Welland Canal Fallen Workers Memorial at the St. Catharines museum in the fall has created a renewed interest in the canal. She hopes that interest, combined with the new online map, will mean crumbling pieces of Garden City history will be protected.
“There is a real buzz about the canals now,” said Beard. “People are more interested in them than they have been in a long time.”
She said assembling the maps and travelling the route of the canals, has given her a new appreciation of how much St. Catharines has changed over the past 200 years.
“You really get a sense for just how vast the canals are, and how much of the land in the city was actually occupied by water,” she said.
Go online to visit the The Historic Welland Canals Mapping Project.