Manufactured island highlights natural beauty
Trail offers scenic, quiet beauty if you catch it at the right moment, when season is right, weather is clear
As much a staple of Welland as its canals, a walk on Merritt Island and its trail offers a scenic and quiet beauty if you catch it at the right moment, when the season is right and the weather is clear.
However, aside from being a local attraction for hikers and people looking to find a bit of nature in an urban environment, Merritt Island has its own place in Welland’s history.
Like the canals themselves, Merritt Island was an artificial feature, created by workers rather than nature. It materialized as a result of digging operations during the development of the old Welland Canal, when the river channel was diverted to take a more direct course, resulting in the formation of this long strip of land and leaving the old canal’s lock to be transformed into the Cross Street pool.
For a long time, the island was known to local residents simply as that: the island, until it was officially designated as Merritt Island in December 1979, in honour of Welland’s founding father and architect behind the idea of the Welland Canal, William Hamilton Merritt.
Between 1979 and 1980, construction began to develop the island for public use by implementing a park, playgrounds and various other amenities. In 1980, the Merritt Island dedication ceremony was held at long last, despite the grounds being vandalized.
A commemorative coin was also minted for the occasion.
The island would also come to host the Merritt Trail, constructed between 1980 and 1986, which would stretch from Port Colborne to Port Dalhousie, and the Welland section of which would go along Merritt Island to King and Lincoln streets, to the other side of the canal and on to Dain City.
This week’s historical photo shows a view of the canal and the island, circa 1950, from the heights of East Main Street’s raised lift bridge — quite a serene display, despite being in black and wite.
Aside from its park and trail, Merritt Island also held the water pump and filtration plant that was constructed there by Welland Water Works. The island’s plant was built to supplement, and eventually replace, the old station that fed off of the raceway, due to concerns about providing sufficient amounts of potable water to the city’s community. In response to calls to improve the system, and an emerging outbreak of typhoid, the station opened and began its operation in 1912, serving as the predecessor to the island’s modern water treatment plant. Prior to that, the island was leased from 1902 to 1911 by Robert Cooper, owner and operator of Riverside Mills, who rented it from the local government and then used the island as land for his ranch, where he raised horses and cattle for sale.
It has continued to survive and thrive to this day, thanks to the support it received. For something that was created entirely by human hands, the beauty that it strives to highlight — the beauty of its green trail and the canal running besideit—isaltogetherverynatu- ral. Information is provided Welland library and museum archive.