This Colossal Project

Building the Welland Ship Canal, 1913-1932

Roberta M. Styran, Robert R. Taylor

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780773547902, 9780773547902
• eBook ISBN: 9780773548343
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Transportation & Navigation
• Index: History

This Colossal Project presents an absorbing epic on the building of the fourth Welland Canal, which connects Lake Ontario and Lake Erie and allows ships to bypass Niagara Falls. An immense undertaking, the canal is a vital part of North America’s infrastructure and still functions as an essential part of the St Lawrence Seaway.

Emphasizing the role that vivid personalities - including engineers John Laing Weller and Alex Grant as well as contractors and labourers - played in the construction of the canal, Roberta Styran and Robert Taylor use archival sources, government documents, newspapers, maps, and original plans to describe a saga of technological, financial, geographical, and social obstacles met and overcome in an accomplishment akin to the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. A story of Canadian skill, courage, vision, and hardship, This Colossal Project details the twenty-year excavation of the giant channel and the creation of huge concrete locks amidst war, the Great Depression, political change, and labour unrest.

Building on the work presented in Styran and Taylor’s This Great National Object, which told the story of the first three Welland canals built in the nineteenth century, This Colossal Project chronicles an impressive milestone in the history of Canadian technological achievement and nation building.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface A Canadian Conception: A Canadian Achievement
• Introduction One of the Very Few Great Ship Canals of the World
• Chapter One This Colossal Project
• Chapter Two Challenges Facing the Ship Canal’s Builders “on the Ground”
• Chapter Three Vision, Skill, and Courage
• Chapter Four Excavating the Prism
• Chapter Five Creating the Lifts
• Chapter Six Managing the Water
• Chapter Seven Building Bridges
• Chapter Eight “Facing their own kaisers at home”
• Chapter Nine Ameliorating Disaster and Squalor
• Chapter Ten “A settled and established community”
• Chapter Eleven Parks and Publicity
• Chapter Twelve “Surpassing anything of the kind”
• Appendices
• Glossary
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index