Map 38. This leg takes us from Wilkes Dam (WD) along the east bank of the Grand, with a side trip along the Holmedale Canal (HC), to the four bridges in downtown Brantford: Lorne Bridge on Colborne Street (A); Brant’s Crossing (B); the TH&B Railway Bridge (C); and the Veterans’ Memorial Parkway Bridge (D).
There are two ways to follow the river from the dam: the paved Gordon Glaves Memorial Pathway (GGMP), suitable for cycling and all-weather hiking, which runs the whole way downtown; and a rustic path, closer to the river’s edge, that runs as far south as Morrell Street, where it joins the GGMP. The GGMP and other major local trails are marked with blue dots on the map, other trails with red dots. It’s about 5.7 km on the GGMP from WD to D.
We’ll see how the river in this urban setting looks at different seasons. We’ll also take a detour into downtown Brantford to visit the Brant Museum (M) and a couple of memorials to significant figures who lived in Brantford: Joseph Brant (JB), the city’s founder; and Alexander Graham Bell (AGB), the telephone pioneer.*
There’s small P at Wilkes Dam, often full. Better bets are the larger free Ps at Waterworks Park or on Morrell Street (access to both is from Grand River Avenue). You can also P at the east end of Grand River Avenue, close to the Lorne Street Bridge. Time-limited free street P in downtown Brantford is not usually difficult to find.
*Brantford is also the home town of Wayne Gretzky, the greatest-ever player of Canada’s national sport. He was brought up in the northern part of the city, where various memorials can be found.
480. George S. Wilkes built this dam across the Grand River in 1857 to supply water power to his flour mills. The dam is an overflow weir with no means of flood control. It currently serves as a head pond from which water is diverted down the Holmedale Canal (see #486 below) to the Brantford municipal waterworks.
481. In mid-September, the Grand upstream of the dam is calm as a mill pond.
482. (Top) Kayakers enjoy battling the turbulent waters below the dam. (Bottom) An angler crouched midriver below the dam checks his phone.
483. South of the dam you have a choice: (top) the GGMP, running along the top of a dike that protects the Holmedale area from flooding; or (bottom) a rustic ramble closer to the riverside.
484. The GGMP is good for birdwatching. (Top) a male rose-breasted grosbeak in a tree by the trail; (bottom) a male northern flicker on a patch of grassy lawn.
485. On the riverside path on a hot summer’s day, (top) a heron is thermoregulating, and (bottom) a dog sporting a fashionable scarf is cooling itself off in a less flamboyant way.
486. Now for a short detour along the Holmedale Canal (top), which begins at Wilkes Dam. There’s a path along its jungly 1.5 km course, and on a summer’s day (bottom) there are turtles a-plenty. The canal takes water from the Grand into the city’s Water Treatment Plant, where it’s ozonated, filtered, disinfected by ultra-violet radiation and chlorination, and fluoridated. Then it’s pumped into reservoirs and two elevated storage tanks. Brantford gets all its drinking water from the Grand River.
487. The Grand’s oxbow embracing the Brantford suburb of Holmedale has been the site of Native settlement for millennia. The river provided drinking water and fish to be caught, and drew thirsty animals that could be hunted, while its semicircular course formed a natural defensive shield to encampments. This information board stands in Waterworks Park near the archaeological site where these discoveries were made.
488. The Lorne Bridge (A on Map 38 above) is a three-span open spandrel arch bridge of reinforced concrete 129 metres long, built in 1924 at a cost of $200,000. It was designed by Brantford City Engineer Frank P. Adams, who believed that concrete bridges were more durable and beautiful than metal ones. This one has proved him right as far as durability goes, having passed the tests posed by the Grand for a century. Renovated in 1980, it carries Colborne Street, Brantford’s main east-west drag, over the Grand.
The first wooden bridge hereabouts was built in 1812, and collapsed just after the first team of horses had crossed it. A covered toll bridge was built here ca. 1841, but it fell down in 1854. That year the first iron bridge was built. It was destroyed by the Grand in 1878, then rebuilt the next year. That was the first Lorne Bridge, named for the Marquess of Lorne, who served as Governor General of Canada from 1878-83.
489. The view from the same spot on the Lorne Bridge looking upstream at different seasons. (Top) early July; (bottom) late January. The GGMP is at right.
490. (Top) From the Lorne Bridge I spot a small boat in the distance upstream. The river runs rapidly under this bridge even at the height of summer, and (bottom) the intrepid kayaker is below the parapet in no time. Shooting the rapids, she steers confidently around exposed rocks and shallows to stay afloat.
491. A detail of a bird’s-eye map of Brantford in 1875. The iron bridge that preceded the first Lorne Bridge crosses the Grand at centre. The former Canal that established Brantford as the head of the Grand River Navigation (see next episode) runs from the centre to the upper right.
Brantford takes its name from a ford across the Grand established by the great Mohawk war chief Joseph Brant (1742-1807), who had sided with the British during the American Revolutionary War. In 1787 he had led his people and others of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy from upstate New York into exile on the Grand River.
However, the city today that arose around Brant’s Ford is not on the same site as the Mohawk Village founded by Brant and where he lived for some years. The latter was quite a distance downstream on what is now the southeastern edge of the city. We’ll visit that area in the next episode.
Brantford lies at the heart of the Haldimand Grant. How did the land it sits on, which wasn’t in any of the six Blocks sold by Brant, come to be settled by non-Aboriginals? A demographic shift is the key to explaining the turnover. By the early nineteenth century, and especially in the near-famine conditions after the War of 1812, the Native population of this area was declining. “Many Indian families had already quit the Grand for reputedly greener fields in the Illinois country. Chronically poor harvests, bitter winters, and a general dissatisfaction with the Indian Department or Norton* had prompted the migration” (Johnston, Brant County 20). Meanwhile, the white settler population, hungry for land, was increasing fast.
The first white settler in what is present-day Brantford is thought to have been one John Salt or Stalts, who built a log cabin in 1805 where the War Memorial now stands on Brant Avenue. Governors Road (Dundas Street) was widened and improved during the War of 1812, and this made access to the Grand River easier for new settlers. So did the opening in 1823 of a road from Hamilton to London via the bridge at Brant’s Ford. Mabel Durham notes, “By 1818 there were twelve white inhabitants living in humble log shacks … As late as 1826 … Brant’s Ford consisted of a thin scattering of frame and log shanties set in a swamp of cedars and scrub oak. The Indians, observing with apprehension the invasion of the whites, were beginning to withdraw to their lands farther south” (174-75).
The first post office opened in 1825, and the name “Brantford” was registered in 1827, chosen over “Birmingham,” the birthplace of the Wilkes family patriarch, and “Lewisville,” after the builder of the first bridge across the Grand that didn’t immediately fall down. A census in 1830 put the population at 350. By then, “the village and its activities were so completely in the hands of the whites that the Mohawks were persuaded to surrender … an area of eight hundred and seven acres … This was to be the white man’s village” (Durham 175).**
The village plot was surveyed and on 14 May 1831 unclaimed lots were put on sale at ten pounds each. From that point Brantford rapidly became (and remains) by far the largest settlement on the Haldimand Tract south of Governors Road, eventually becoming Canada’s leading farm implement manufacturing centre. Brantford was incorporated as a town in 1847, and became a city in 1877, when its population was about 10,000.
*John Norton, who on Brant’s death in 1807 had assumed leadership of the Six Nations, had gotten into a bitter, long-running personal feud with William Claus of the Indian Department.
**Five shillings has been cited as the purchase price of Mohawk Chief John Hill’s 807 acre farm, the future site of downtown Brantford.
492. The Brant County Museum and Archives opened in 1951 at 59 Charlotte Street downtown. It contains permanent displays as well as temporary exhibitions relating to local history. It’s open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 1:00-5:00 pm and entry is free (donations welcome).
493. The Joseph Brant Memorial stands at the centre of Victoria Square in downtown Brantford. It was sculpted by Percy Wood (UK, 1860-1904) and unveiled in 1886. The bronze for the statues was derived from 13 melted-down cannons from the Battle of Waterloo and the Crimean War, provided by the British Government.
(Top) On a granite pedestal, the nine-foot high statue of Brant himself; (middle) a detail thereof. Below him are ranged two life-size sculptural groups representing the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. (Bottom) Statues representing Seneca, Onondaga, and Cayuga chiefs. There are also bas-reliefs in bronze around the base of the pedestal.
One recent commentator from the Art Canada Institute asserts, “This memorial has no particular artistic merit itself” (Brandon). However, it should be pretty obvious to almost everyone else that this is a very impressive monument indeed. It was renovated in 2024, and now looks splendid.
As we shall see, Joseph Brant, whose Mohawk name was Thayendanegea, has been a controversial figure to both Natives and Non-Natives for more than two centuries.* Some among the former resented his power, influence, and relative wealth, while some among the latter could not accept his lifelong determination to secure independence for the Six Nations. However, for anyone who has looked closely at his life and achievements, Brant’s major importance in Canadian nation-building cannot be denied.
*Brant, like quite a few of his wealthy white contemporaries in the early years of Upper Canada, was a slave-holder, and in his case an unapologetic one. Should he therefore be “cancelled” today, and his name removed from the many places and institutions named for him? I have no satisfactory answer to this question, though the well-known quotation, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” seems to me to express an important truth. And what does all this say about the movement to cancel Henry Dundas, the over-cautious abolitionist? (see 456 above).
494. So let’s compare the Brant Memorial with another monument a few hundred metres away, namely the Bell Telephone Memorial in Bell Memorial Park on West Street. This one, commemorating the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell (see next episode), was designed by Walter Seymour Allward (Canadian, 1874-1955). It was unveiled in 1917, after years of delay.
Two towering female figures stand on pedestals either side, in unnatural poses that I think are supposed to signify that a phone call is taking place between them. There’s a long bronze panel at centre, where a naked bas-relief figure symbolizing Man the Inventor is being inspired by a female Muse to invent a means of instant communication at a distance. The total effect is ludicrous, not to mention sexist in the extreme.*
This kind of sculpture derives from the world before 1914, when far too much faith was placed in the reality of personified abstractions such as Honour, Glory, and Valour. Such phantasms led nations blindly into the slaughter of WWI.
Compared to this, the Brant Memorial is a model of restraint and good taste.
*The assemblage does work as a prophecy of phone sex! The male, aroused by the thought of the half-naked female floating above him, is inspired to join in the phone call between two giantesses, each displaying one breast with an erect nipple …
495. The view from Lorne Bridge downstream of the three other downtown bridges in January. Starting with the nearest: Brant’s Crossing (B), the TH&B Bridge (C), and the Veterans Memorial Parkway Bridge (D).
496. This former CN rail bridge (B, 1913), now rebranded as Brant’s Crossing, is a steel four-span double through truss bridge with a timber deck and concrete piers and abutments. The bridge doesn’t follow the probable line of Brant’s original ford, but crosses it at an angle. In 1932 a sundial and boulder were placed by the Brant Historical Society to mark the likely western end of Brant’s ford. But these have now been moved to the gardens by the Lorne Bridge. Go figure!
Following the abandonment of the CN rail line, the bridge, which also carried a water main, was converted for pedestrian use in 1996. The two truss sections aren’t identical, suggesting that one of the spans is a replacement. This wouldn’t be surprising, given what we know of the history of Grand River bridges. This one was damaged by an ice jam as recently as 2018. It was closed during the summer of 2025 for the renovation of its superstructure.
497. The reverse angle of #496 above, viewed from the TH&B Bridge. That yellow and red building by the end of the Lorne Bridge is the Brantford Armoury. In late January, the Grand is by no means totally frozen, but courses powerfully through and beneath the surface ice.
498. (Top) This rather decrepit structure is the former Toronto, Hamilton and Buffalo (TH&B) Railway Bridge (C, 1890). “Illinois, USA” is pressed into the bridge’s beams, indicating the source of the steel. This bridge has also been pedestrianized. The TH&B was notorious for never actually reaching either Toronto or Buffalo. The steep bank of the Grand River is responsible for the TH&B’s withdrawal from Brantford, as in 1986 its line to Hamilton was washed out by a landslide and abandoned.
Remarkably, between 1851 and 1911, Brantford was served by ten different rail lines! Today only CN and an infrequent passenger service by VIA Rail remain. As its many abandoned lines have been turned into rail trails, the city now describes itself as “The Hub of Ontario Trails.”
(Bottom) All 112 panels on the interior walls of this bridge display images of local interest as part of a public art project completed in 2023.
499. Icy reflections in the Grand, midwinter.
500. On a hot day, kids play in the Grand River by the remains of a concrete abutment between the TH&B Bridge and the Veterans’ Memorial Parkway Bridge.
501. The sleek lines of the Veterans’ Memorial Parkway Bridge (1972). Aside from the Lorne Bridge 800 m upstream, this is the only other Grand River crossing for motorized vehicles in central Brantford.
Holmström Ruddick 