YESTERDAY & TODAY Reconstructing the church at Beaver Dams
Once upon a time, two of Niagara’s major roads — one running southwest from Queenston to St. Johns, the other running northwest from Fort Erie to Burlington — crossed a bit south and west of today’s Thorold.
Naturally a community grew up around that crossroads and the village seemed destined to be a key settlement in this region. That village was named Beaver Dams.
In the earliest days of the Methodist church in that area, services were held in the home of Israel Swayze near the village of Beaver Dams.
It was not until 1832 that the Methodists bought from Hiram Swayze a 0.4-hectare (one-acre) site near the Beaver Dams crossroads on which they erected a wood-frame meeting house to accommodate their growing congregation.
A cemetery was soon established on the grounds of the church, and a Sunday school was organized there in 1840.
However, although Beaver Dams was still seemingly at the crossroads of Niagara when the church was erected in 1832, the balance had begun to shift in the direction of Thorold, toward which economic activity and population were drawn after the Welland Canal was constructed through it in the late 1820s.
The village of Beaver Dams steadily dwindled in size and importance, and by 1890 its Methodist church had closed.
The building remains to this day on Marlatts Road, just off Beaverdams Road. For decades now the congregation of Trinity United Church in Thorold has headed out to Beaver Dams on the first Sunday in June to worship in the church of their forefathers. A provincial plaque near the church recognizes it as “one of the oldest remaining Methodist chapels in the province.”
The past few years have seen the church building benefiting from the efforts of local volunteers.
In 2010 the United Church of Canada sold the property to the City of Thorold, and four years later the city sold it to the Friends of Beaverdams Church. The Friends is a group of local volunteers who recognize the heritage value of the old building but have been concerned about its deteriorating physical condition. The Friends incorporated and began raising funds first to do preventive maintenance of the premises. Thus far the volunteers have stabilized the building’s foundation, given it a new roof and provided it with authentic replacement windows.
The volunteers are also doing important upgrading on the interior of the church. Most interestingly, they are eyeing the eventual re-opening, after more than a century, of the building’s second floor. Its galleries have been sealed off since the late 1860s, by which time the congregation there had seriously dwindled in size.
Our old image of this week’s subject is a very appealing watercolour done by Toronto artist Owen Staples (1866-1949). On the left is Marlatts Road, and on the right we see the church and the gravestones of the cemetery adjacent to it.
This is one of many such paintings of historic Niagara sites that Staples did in the period 1911 to 1913. Included in that collection are views of Queenston, Niagaraon-the-Lake and St. Catharines, plus another Beaverdams Church painting, showing the building’s interior.