THE LOST VILLAGES OF THE ST LAWRENCE SEAWAY

I don't think people would allow that many people to be displaced again 6,500 people were in the path of progress, that's what Hydro called it, they called it progress. You are so foolish that I can't imagine this happening again. Many of the elderly. people seem to pass away soon after this and it was probably because of their broken hearts that sometimes they could go straight to where else the

lost

villages

were, there were six of them mill rush molonet wales dixon's landing fahrens point and altsville we have 10 heritage buildings here in the angels museum site i spent a lot of time here my wife calls this my first home instead of my second home my name is jim brownell i am the president of the

lost

towns historical society i have been here for quite a while there are hundreds of stories that could be told about the relocation I was surprised by what you were able to hide from all this and I suspect that you were like those who kept all this for a long time that story was as if forgotten and they did not want to No, but they made an effort not to talk too much about it being a Cyrus Erie 45 larger iron.

Several of our lost

villages

, people can go from one end of the building to the other and tell you who lived in each house because it's burned down. in our minds one day rosie said to clay when you're done I don't remember what shoes I wore this morning but some of the memories are so indelible I'm Alan Day and I'm a voice of the lost town of Mill Rush, if you're willing to swim about 250 feet and go right to the bottom, which is about 24 feet deep, you can see the foundation of the house I was born in in the picture of almost any small rural town in Eastern Ontario.

We had five churches. We had a big stadium and we had a paper mill. It was very calm. If you wanted to be busy, you went to the highway where the trucks were. It was very calm. It was very picturesque. There are many tall trees along number two. road there are beautiful old houses some united empire loyalist houses my name is david hill and i grew up in the lost town of longneck and we forgot how great the rapids launch was you remember growing up as a kid and then the first thing you could what What you do is hear the roar, then you can feel the spray on your face and when you get close it's just tremendous.

I could still see the town. I could still feel the love in the town. Everyone treated you with respect. My name is Noella Worrell. it was noella st louis from the lost town of milrush everyone cared about everyone someone was sick oh don't worry about cooking you would get fat if there was a tragedy people were there to support you when something happened in the united church all the People came and there was something what was happening in the Anglican church. People came, so it was a community center. My name is Joel Mckeown and I represent the voices of the townspeople of Wales and we like to go.

We went to the city of Wales and visited its places and participated in some of the events. Most of the events were church related. As children we roamed the town quite freely and because the train tracks were right at the back of our property. We were practically playing on the tracks, which wasn't wise, but we did it anyway, we walked to the dock, who comes to pick me up when you got home, you had to turn the outside porch on and off to tell them you were home. a community raised people if your parents weren't there watching you someone would be seven thousand miles of coastline in the center of a continent a vast sea different in only one respect from the world's other historic seven the great lakes were landlocked and isolated by the nature of maritime transport on the map there seemed to be a passage for ships a natural canal the san lorenzo river the san lorenzo presented enormous obstacles rapids that even in our time seemed insurmountable but there were those who thought otherwise a system of canals and locks here on the outskirts of Montreal in Lachine in Soulage and in the international express section and we can open a whole large continent to ocean trade and I say it can be done and is being done right now in the largest concentration of heavy machinery ever assembled.

More than 3,000 teams worked on one of the largest projects in human history. There was a huge project that began in 54. Engineers knew at the beginning of the 20th century that energy could be generated from rapids in the long term and that Maybe the

seaway

could be expanded to accept those oceangoing ships. There were some properties that had to be exported by law. They had to give up the properties. I would say there is a lot of anxiety and people are upset, a lot of people like my father did. I didn't think this was really going to happen, some people may have been taken advantage of at the beginning of the project when all those agreements had to be made, I can tell you that people stood up and knew what their rights were.

One time, during a presentation, the person giving the presentation was saying that everyone in the town was very happy about the move because it meant that they would now have running water and sewage and everyone could see a wonderful future. There I jumped out of my chair and said some things that maybe I shouldn't have said that not everyone liked the relocation it was a big thing in 1955 they started moving house and I saw how many little children did it at that time these huge engines that come lifting an entire house, houses of brick also imagine that they held the brick chimney inside and the terrace post with the balcony, the base of those terrace posts were made of brick, they moved those posts, the terrace post intact, I marveled at I thought so.

How could that be? I saw big moving companies passing by with excavators, big trucks. It was fascinating. He was at a very formative age when the

seaway

project was being carried out. It was a fascinating time and I can remember the vehicles. Oh man, something saw the house. the moving company, the wheels and the moving company were huge, a man was physically removed from his house because it wouldn't move, he didn't care about the seaweed, no one was going to take his house away from him, so they physically moved, so My dad's job was to care. the cemetery and had to identify the graves in the cemetery and some of them were attached to previous loyalist graves and then had to contact the family to have these people ask the families if they wanted the graves to be moved to the new cemetery or a of the graves covered with cement and that was the volunteer job he had, you can imagine the letters he had to write, but these are so familiar to me, this huge house here is not the biggest, the biggest house and the biggest house . the move was a single family house, he was moving to england, but this was, uh, sorry, alan federer's house, this was a tourist house, this is one of the cabins on that site and he never looked back after winning money at the top of the seaway because the cabins were It was always cold because not only did tourists come but there were all these hydroelectric workers, uh, looking for residence for the residents, so there's a lot of story to tell in this collage.

This collage, by the way, was put together by well, I put it together, but I was able to do that because a guy in Cornwall was knocking down a garage and, lo and behold, here in the garage was his photo album with these photos, well, he looked at the photos and thought, "Oh, these aren't pictures of cornmeal." and then you thought maybe they are from a lost village, so he came to my classroom, I was teaching in a long suit public class and I walked into the classroom, I opened it and sure enough, there was a house that my uncle grandfather built it, that house is there. very soon that could float anything that obstructed the generation of power in the power dam had to go so everything had burned I saw the destruction I saw fires burning they were small friendly pastoral very picturesque towns we saw all that destroyed to lose those things Lots of people She is upset and many.

I will tell this too, that many of the older people seem to pass away shortly after this and it was probably from their hearts being broken by the many long-time residents of the area, people whose ancestors had pioneered the saint. Lawrence Valley July 1, 1958 was a day they would not forget, the climax of years of planning and construction was within reach, the flooding of 58,40,000 acres of land flooded, what happened to my dad, that's funny story because he really didn't think he was going to go as far as they said he would go. He had a bridge that went over Hubble Creek and there was some good wood that he wanted to save, so when the water started coming in, he got the kids. busy dismantling the bridge and when they finished in the afternoon the water was up to their necks, so it was quite an experience and I thought it was a very sad image of how Canada becomes a modern country in the sense that all the traditions and family ties and villages, I mean in Canada most people know a village somewhere in their heart and now it's all flooded, a place to come back to, yeah this was just donated to our historical society recently , uh, a gentleman from quite a distance from here I want to leave something in memory of his father and his father was a photographer so this is the photograph which is an absolutely stunning and very clear photo of the queen a very clear image now we have other photographs in our museum, but nothing of the quality of this one in 1959 until the queen came to open, I think she was about 15, then Susan McLaren gave her flowers and the people, all the council people were there, so we're all there .

During the entire performance, I remember that she was very well dressed in a white hat and gloves. The two really large communities that were created out of nothing in farmers' fields were long cycles of super angles that created the main pond, flooded 3,200 hectares along the Canadian coast, displacing 6,500 residents from a series of small towns and villages. of iroquois it was decided to reestablish the entire town on a new site about two and a half miles to the north, only a portion of morrisburg was affected, so a new subdivision was drawn to take care of the homes and businesses originally located along of the natural coast to absorb the smaller communities.

Two new towns were created located about 25 kilometers west of Cornwall. The city of England combined the ancient villages of Wales. Dickinson's Landing Parents Point and Altsville. The new town of Long Sioux absorbed the residence of Mia Rush and the movement 6,500 people had to be relocated from those villages and at that time, because most of the people it must have been a tragedy in some ways, but were there people who thought it was a great idea even apart? of those who benefited from it, many companies and those who built the dam and all that, but if there were people, this is a good thing, now we have to move forward, it is a new era, everything you know, at that time they knew that was. what was going to happen, they knew in the first decade of the 20th century 19 well, whatever the first decade was, they knew that energy could be generated from the long Sioux rapids, they knew that bones growing in the ocean could not reach the sea route, so they knew everything. that was inevitable in their minds and the new village was a lonely village now but originally it was uh there's a lot of mud there's no trees and we had a new school new churches but there were a lot of adjustments a lot of the farmers, which was difficult for them, they had They had to leave farming and they moved to the city and retired and some of them didn't survive that long afterward.

I think it was too big a shock for them. I was 15 and a half when I had to stop all I could think about since the day I moved to Cornwall was how quickly can I get out of here when I was 16. The day I turned 16 I left my room with my suitcase. He had only been living there six years. months and my mother said where are you going I said I'm leaving here I'm 16 now you can't stop me she said oh yes I can I told her no you can and I had my suitcase packed and I was leaving the house because I hated it uh grandpa never came back once Only time dad after about four years after the lake was created, we would come here right in this little bay and go fishing, which was hard for him the first few times because that was In town we're fishing, but it was really a long transition for my parents and grandparents, it was a particularly stressful time and many of those who suffered as a result did not live as long after the cycle, some of them dying within a year or two. after being forced to move, we are much richer here at the lost peoples historical society museum for having members like rosemary rutley and people like um uh joel mcq and alan day david hill uh noella warrell uh but it's also true that We get very excited when the younger generation shows interest in getting excited and I can see that our past president from last year, uh, 22 years old, when he became a life member of our historical society, it makes everyone's heart feel great.

I bet you do, my name is Natalia Villeneuve Hi, my name is Kelsey Gaino. I go to the University ofTrent in Peterborough, so my favorite thing in the general store is actually this clock right above me. It stopped on July 1, 1958 at 8 a.m. m. and the last cofferdam exploded at the end of the sea route project. It's my favorite article because it was literally frozen in time and marked the end of the project. In the store, this cash register is my favorite item. It ran until August 2001. Well, that's pretty recent, it came from Markle's general store in the lost village of Wales.

Water levels in the fall usually drop quite a bit and when they drop, many of the streets and sidewalks reappear and you can walk through where the village used to be. Being situated and when that is the case, several things resurfaced. This is a collection of pieces that were discovered in Altsville by uh Jim's sister during a hike when the water levels were pretty low, so we have different, different pieces of glass bottles, a common thing that I used to find there all the time. time when I was a child. I used to go with my grandparents and finding china and cutlery really is the enthusiasm you see in young people.

My sister is certainly younger than me by donating that and then Gardner has the opportunity to tell stories about it and the connections of it. There is an example of his connections to our last villages through his grandmother and great-grandmother and you know what all that is, he is the next cycle of the wheel and when you think of life as big cycles, he is the one who enters in the next cycle of the wheel that will hopefully advance this story to the next generation. Their children and their grandchildren, when I started diving we were looking for shipwrecks and things like that that happened 35 years ago, but now our passion is to see the historical at the bottom, people can't see very often anymore what was left there, it's okay to see the old buildings, although they are foundations or just steps, you were running along an old boardwalk and you'll see some steps, okay or just this huge stop of trees that's been there for 60 years, seven years in The bottom is quite an experience to dive there with the fish and see what was there almost 70 years ago the last time people saw it.

It was so absurd that I can't imagine this happening again. I don't think people would allow it to displace him. many people again, we all know how many millions, billions of dollars of trade go up and down the sea lane so that they dwarf those of us who lost our homes, it seems to be part of the get rich mentality of our species, no matter what let's do. disrupt the planet while we can fix it so I'm interested in keeping history alive that's the main thing it's my connection to my past I don't want anyone to forget the horrible things they did to us then and if the town wasn't there it would be forgotten this is our thing This is our heritage and I think it is important that this is shared, right?