Map 39. The Grand River heads south from central Brantford and then turns east at Tutela Heights. It then sweeps northeast and southwest in an enormous oxbow, the largest on the Grand. Over the course of about 14.5 km, the river turns back on itself, to arrive a mere 700 metres south from where it began its loop. Though there is a public road through the western sector of the oxbow, the internal bank of the Grand in the oxbow is entirely on private land and inaccessible to hikers. There is only limited access to the Grand on the outer bank of the oxbow, as most of this too is on private land.
We’ll follow the Grand on its west bank south from where we left it in Part 17. We’ll visit the Bell Homestead (BH) on Tutela Heights and continue down the Grand Valley Trail (blue, then red dots) as far as Cockshutt Road. We’ll then cross Cockshutt Bridge and go north to pick up the Gordon Glaves Memorial Pathway (GGMP) where it crosses Erie Avenue (blue dots). Then we’ll turn east and visit the Royal Chapel of the Mohawks (MC) and the site of the former Mohawk Village as well as the Woodland Centre (WC) and other sites of Indigenous interest on Mohawk Road. We’ll then examine what’s left of the Brantford Canal, visit the Bird Path (BP) and finish at the beginning of the Hamilton to Brantford Rail Trail (HBRT). There are free Ps on Gilkison Rd., at BH, MC, WC, and at the east end of Beach Rd.
The oxbow may be inaccessible to hikers, but it’s excellent for paddlers. You need bring only one vehicle, which you P at the access point at Cockshutt Bridge off Erie Avenue. The waters of the oxbow are usually calm and there are no rapids. However, be aware that the riverbanks are almost all private land and after about halfway, there no places to rest up until you reach the put-in below the bridge on Newport Road. Once you’ve completed the three-to-four-hour loop you have only a short walk back to your vehicle.
502. April 2018, the aftermath of the spring thaw. The Grand can never be completely tamed. (Top) Gilkison Street south of the Veterans’ Memorial Parkway Bridge. The paved edge and gravel base of the roadway has been undermined by flooding and fallen tree branches block the paved trail. (Bottom) This uprooted sign has never been replaced on this site.
503. If it’s not closed for the season, enjoy the riverside path – technically part of the Grand Valley Trail (GVT) – through Gilkison Flats. Downstream, it’s a long way before you’ll be able to hike along the river on such a pleasant paved trail again.
504. (Top) In January a song sparrow is the only sign of life on Gilkison Flats.
(Bottom) In early September an osprey monitors the river from a bare branch.
505. The GVT is supposed to take you below and past Tutela Heights (at centre, above the bend in the river). However, in summer you’d need a machete to make it through there. I turned back soon after this point.
Tutela Heights gets its name from a small band of Tutelo (Siouan) First Nations who had been adopted by the Cayugas and settled in the area in 1785 when the Mohawks and other Six Nations Loyalists came to British North America. The main body of Tutelo people now inhabit part of central Pennsylvania. More information here.
506. The Bell Homestead National Historic Site at 94 Tutela* Heights Road, south of Brantford. This was the house owned by the father of Alexander (“Alec”) Graham Bell, who had bought it in 1870 for $2,600 and who lived in it until 1881. The family was Scottish, and Bell Senior had moved them to the relatively clean air of Ontario for the sake of Alec’s health. His two other sons had both died of tuberculosis and he feared that Alec would be next.
For most of his parents’ years in Canada, Alec lived and working in Boston and area, scraping by as a teacher of the deaf but obsessed with the idea of creating a “speaking telegraph.” He only occasionally visited his parents’ place outside Brantford.
However, there is little doubt that the telephone was conceived during Alec’s stay here during the summer of 1874: “On August 10 … Alec strolled out of the house toward the bluff overlooking the Grand River. A large tree had blown down here, creating a natural and completely private belvedere, which Alec had dubbed his ‘dreaming place’” (Gray 73). Several other inventors were working toward enabling the existing electric telegraph to carry the human voice. But none had Bell’s profound knowledge of human anatomy, and in particular, of the way the ear translates vibrations into sound. This gave him an advantage over rival inventors who were expert electricians, which Bell assuredly was not. “Suddenly the idea struck him that it might be possible to create an undulating electric current that could carry sound along a telegraph wire in the same way that air carried sound waves from the speaker to the hearer … This was the ‘eureka‘ moment for Alexander Graham Bell – his flash of genius. In his dreaming place overlooking the swirling waters of the Grand River, he had grasped the principle on which the telephone would operate” (74).
*In Bell’s day this was “Tutelo,” the usual spelling of the First Nation’s name. It’s not clear when or why it became “Tutela.”
507. Vegetation on the river bluff immediately behind the Bell Homestead is practically impenetrable in summer, but in winter the Grand can be glimpsed below through the naked trees.
You could say that the Grand River was the locus of inspiration for an invention whose importance has grown steadily since 1874, and exponentially in the past 20 years. These days your smartphone is more than a communications device; it’s an essential part of your identity. Bell’s invention has changed the world more than he or anyone else could ever have imagined.
508. Alexander Graham Bell (1947), a posthumous portrait by M. Neton. Oil on canvas, courtesy of the Brant County Museum and Archives, Brantford.
Bell (1847-1922) was unquestionably an inventive genius. But unlike, for example, his contemporary Thomas Edison, he had no interest in aggressively marketing his inventions. In fact, he became so thoroughly disgusted by the endless legal claims against his patent that he wanted nothing more to do with the telephone, even though it had made him rich and famous. His true vocation had always been to teach the deaf to communicate. Both his mother and his wife were deaf, at a time when infections in childhood destroyed hearing far more commonly than they do today. His knowledge of the anatomy of the ear and of the speech-forming elements of the mouth and tongue came from his close study of those phenomena with the aim of helping the deaf to read lips and form the sounds of speech.
Bell was a free-thinking Scotsman, who became a US resident and in 1882 an American citizen in order to ease patent applications. An inspirational teacher of the deaf and a superb pianist, he had a volatile temperament, would sometimes work obsessively for twenty-two hours in a day, required a rigid domestic routine, and was subject to fits of hypochondria. His deaf wife Mabel, daughter of an upper-crust Boston family, provided the stability and strength of character to keep him grounded. She bore him two daughters, but they lost two sons in infancy.
Bell was remarkably free of the racial prejudices of his age. While in Brantford, he made a friend on the Six Nations Reserve, Chief George Henry Martin Johnson (Onwanonsyshon) (the father of the poet Pauline Johnson), who taught him a Mohawk war dance that he would subsequently break into at moments of elation. In Washington DC, his US base, he had a Black assistant, Charles Thompson, for more than thirty years. Thompson was staggered and moved when, at their first meeting, Bell treated him like a fellow human being: “I loved Mr. Bell from that moment” (Gray 250).
World-famous and a millionaire thanks to the telephone, Bell was temperamentally adrift in the aggressive business climate of the US Gilded Age. He found a measure of peace in remote, Gaelic-speaking Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. He spent as much time as possible on his estate, Beinn Bhreagh, near Baddeck, for the last thirty-five years of his life, working obsessively on a number of projects including man-lifting kites, heavier-than-air flight, and hydrofoils, few of which bore fruit in his lifetime. He and Mabel are buried at his Cape Breton estate overlooking Bras-d’Or Lake.
509. Bell kept scrupulous records of his laboratory work. That was just as well, as he had to face more than six hundred lawsuits that disputed his priority when it came to the invention of the telephone. He and his lawyers won every one of them.
Bell spent only a small fraction of his 75 years at his parents’ place outside Brantford. However, the time that he did spend there was certainly important when it came to his great invention. His handwritten note on display in the Bell Homestead summarizes telephone chronology. Under “Events”: “The invention of the Telephone at Tutelo Heights … Brantford … summer of 1874.” Other important events at Brantford include, “The first draft of the telephone patent specification prepared” (September 1875); “The first successful attempt to transmit speech over telegraph lines”; “First public demonstration of ability to speak over a telegraph line”; and “First transmission of a number of voices simultaneously over a telegraph line” (all August 1876). But the top entry is the crucial one: we have it from the man himself that Brantford was where he invented the telephone. And Brantford, which calls itself the Telephone City, has gone to town on its Bell associations (see, e.g., #494 above).
510. The view of the Grand along the GVT looking downstream from an overlook east of the Bell Homestead. This blazed trail is hikable in the summer, though it’s a rough ramble halfway up the river bluff, with only the occasional lookout. It would be very tricky to negotiate after rain. The trail eventually emerges on Cockshutt Road. To sample it, P roadside on the south side of Tutela Heights Road east of Davern Road and take the short access trail.
511. The Gordon Glaves Memorial Pathway (GGMP) runs along the top of a dike across cultivated river flats south of Brantford. Before dikes were built, the floodplain of the Grand in Brantford, amounting to 3,400 acres, was inundated annually. There were dikes in place during the great flood of May 1974 (see #374 in Galt), but the river rose 5 metres, overtopping them. The new improved dike system was built 1978-92 by the Grand River Conservation Authority and the City of Brantford.
512. Joseph Brant the Mohawk Chief (1776) by George Romney (UK, 1734-1802). This portrait was painted in London during Brant’s visit there along with Guy Johnson, superintendent of Indian affairs in America. Brant was then 33 years old, had affirmed the traditional loyalty of the Mohawks (see #515 below) to the English monarch (George III) as the American Revolutionary War began, and been lionized by London society.
Mohawk Village was closely associated with Joseph Brant. He founded it as Ohsweken, i.e., New Oswego, but it soon was known simply as Brant’s Town. His house was its largest building, and there he lavishly entertained many visiting dignitaries, as well as the traveller Patrick Campbell, author of Travels in the Interior Inhabited Parts of North America in the Years 1791 and 1792 (1793) (see pp. 190-211). Among many other things, Campbell noted that the beauty of Brant’s wife Catherine “so far surpassed” that of the white ladies present “as not to admit of the smallest comparison” (190).
To recap: Brant had realized that the Haldimand Tract was far too large and undeveloped for his small band of followers to farm alone, even if Six Nations were agriculturally inclined, which many of them were not. Nor was the Tract suitable for a life centred on hunting, being a thin strip of land with a wide, unbridged river dividing it in half. So he planned to sell off much of the Tract to land-hungry white settlers. They would provide farming instruction to those of Six Nations who could benefit from it, and the money from the sales would be invested to give his people a secure future. Brant underwent many struggles with the colonial administration before finally being allowed in 1798 to use his power of attorney to conduct sales of six large blocks of land. However, for reasons already touched upon, the proceeds of these sales rarely accrued to the Six Nations.
Brant had difficulty getting enough Natives to settle on the Grand. After the Revolution, the American branches of Six Nations seemed more comfortable staying put than might have been imagined. Moreover, Lord Dorchester, the Governor General of British North America, didn’t want more Americans settled on the Grand. So right from the beginning, Mohawk Village had an ethnically mixed population: “there were Indians called Six Nations who had scarcely any Iroquois blood … many Delawares … Joseph’s white friends from his war days … squatters who claimed to have bought land from individual Indians … white captives who refused to go home … deserters from Wayne’s army … the adventurer Ebenezer Allen, who had fled his mill on the Genesee for reasons best known to himself … Joseph’s confidant, John Norton [a Scotsman by birth] … the blacksmith, the miller, and the schoolmaster, three white men … The surveyor, Augustus Jones [a white man with an Indian wife],” and so on (Kelsay 538-9).
So when it was time for Brant to take up the more than 3,000-acre land grant he was entitled to as a Loyalist Captain, he bought a tract on Burlington Bay at the Head of Lake Ontario from the Mississaugas for $300. (This transaction incurred the wrath of Lieut.-Gov. Simcoe, who didn’t like Indians making land deals with each another, but who couldn’t do much about this one.) Meanwhile, the Grand River Indian settlements were being depopulated, thanks to continuing crop failures and often near starvation conditions. And white settlers and squatters were encroaching more and more on Indian lands. Brant had made a number of enemies among Six Nations, who had marked him out as “too great a man” (597) and who considered his own prosperity suspicious. He decided in about 1802 that he would leave Mohawk Village for his property at the Head of the Lake. From that point, Mohawk Village’s days were numbered.
As we have seen, the white settlement of Brant’s Ford 3.5 km to the northwest, rather than the Mohawk Village of Brant’s Town, rose to be the main local urban centre on the Grand. By 1840 there were 2,000 white squatters on Indian land, but Samuel Jarvis, Chief Superintendent of Indian Affairs, refused to evict them. He proposed instead that the Haudenosaunee surrender all their remaining lands to the Crown to prevent further encroachment, in return for cash and a protected reserve. The Crown obtained the disputed “general surrender” under those terms, though 51 chiefs and warriors protested it a month later, saying Jarvis had coerced or manipulated those who’d signed. Meanwhile, Jarvis was sacked in 1845 after reports that he had stolen several thousand pounds from the Indian Department. Finally, in 1850 the Crown passed a proclamation setting the Six Nations Reserve at approximately 47,000 acres (19,020 hectares).
Though it’s the second largest in Canada, Six Nations Reserve, almost entirely on the west (here, the south) bank of the Grand, is only 5% or less of the territory granted by the Haldimand Proclamation. Its centre, Ohsweken, is about 11 km southeast of the Mohawk Chapel. The bitter dispute between Six Nations and various levels of Canadian government that continues today has to do with both land ownership, especially in the area around the town of Caledonia, and the disappearance of funds held in trust for Six Nations that had been raised by the sale of their land. For what happened to some of that money, see #531 below.
513. The Mohawk Village (ca. 1793), a drawing on birch bark that Lady Elizabeth Simcoe, wife of the Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, made during a visit. It shows the steepled Mohawk Chapel (at right, partially hidden by a cabin) in its original orientation. The Chapel was altered in 1829: its spire was rebuilt on the west end and the east door was closed off. Joseph Brant’s house is almost certainly the large one at left, with a fence and a flag flying.
514. The former configuration of the Grand River’s great oxbow, showing at centre the smaller loop in the river that had its apex at the site of the Mohawk Village. For back then, the Grand flowed by the foot of the bluff by the Village, providing a convenient landing place for canoes. Later the river receded, the loop having dried up. This 1863 map also shows the course of the Grand River Navigation Company’s Canal (see #528-531 below) from central Brantford to the point near the apex of the oxbow where it rejoined the Grand River.
515. St. Paul’s, Her Majesty’s Royal Chapel of the Mohawk, is the only building still in place where the Mohawk Village once stood. It was built in 1785, the same year that Brant founded the Village. It’s the oldest surviving church in Ontario.
In 1710, Six Nations chiefs had travelled to England, met Queen Anne, and expressed their loyalty to the British Crown. A Chapel dedicated to Queen Anne had then been built in Fort Hunter, New York, housing a silver communion service, a 1709 Bible, and embroidered altar cloths, all gifts of the Queen. But after the American Revolution, when the Mohawks and others of the Six Nations had sided with the British and were consequently no longer welcome on US territory, Joseph Brant led his followers here to the Grand River. The Fort Hunter chapel was abandoned and eventually demolished, its stones used in the construction of locks for the Erie Canal. This chapel was built to replace it.
516. (Top) The interior of the Chapel, looking towards the east end. The three black panels over the altar are tablets displaying (left to right) the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer, all in Kanienʼkéha, the Mohawk language. (Bottom) The Ten Commandments.
517. Perhaps the Chapel’s most outstanding feature are eight stained glass windows that depict significant moments in the history of the Haudenosaunee* (Iroquois) People of the Longhouse. This one, entitled “The Great Peace,” imagines the formation of the original Five Nations Confederacy. Above is the Far Seeing Eagle, the divine guardian of the Confederacy. Below that is a representation of the wampum belt symbolizing the alignment of the Five Nations, with the central symbol representing the Onondaga, Fire Keepers of the Confederacy. At centre, the prophet and visionary Deganawidah (The Peacemaker) stands before a white pine tree, which has, significantly, five needles in each cluster. At his feet sit chiefs representing the Five Nations: Seneca (Onöndowa’ga:’), Oneida (Onyota’a:ka), Onondaga (Onoñda’gegá’’), Cayuga (Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ), and Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka). The sixth personage is Hiawatha, a skilled orator who served as the Peacemaker’s spokesman. Below that are depicted some of the totem animals of Haudenosaunee clans.
The lower panel contains this inscription: I am Deganawidah … I plant the Tree of the Great Peace … If any man or any nation … shall show a desire to obey the laws of the Great Peace … they shall be welcomed to take shelter beneath the Tree – The words of Hiawatha, spokesman for Deganawidah.
The eight windows (installed 1959-62) were designed by David Mitson of Dundas, and were made by Clayton and Bell of London, England.
*This is an anglicization of the Seneca word Hodinöhsö:ni’; the Mohawk equivalent is Rotinonshón:ni. Five Nations became Six when the Tuscarora (Skarù:ręˀ) joined the Confederacy in 1722.
518. This detail from Window IV, “Reunion of Old Friends,” shows Joseph Brant (right) clasping the hand of Rev. John Stuart as he arrives by canoe. Above them is the Mohawk Village on the Grand River as it was depicted on the birch bark drawing by Elizabeth Simcoe (see #513 above).
Rev. John Stuart (1740-1811) was a Pennsylvania-born Anglican missionary who’d first met Brant at Canajoharie, New York (the Upper Castle of the Mohawks) in 1770. The scene depicted above was in 1788, when Stuart arrived at what he called “New Oswego,” having travelled by canoe from Kingston, where he had become the first resident Anglican minister in what is now Ontario. Stuart was the first ordained minister to conduct a service in the Mohawk Chapel.
The panel below bears the following inscription: Kingston, Cataraqui July 2, 1788. I embarked with Captain Brant on the 27th of last May and proceeded to the village of New Oswego where I was well received. On the Sunday following … preached and administered the Sacrament to 16, baptized 65 persons and married 3 couples. – Letter from Rev. John Stuart to the S[ociety for the] P[ropagation of the] G[ospel in Foreign Parts].
519. The tomb of Thayendanegea (Captain Joseph Brant) and his son Ahyonwaeghs (Captain John Brant, 1784-1832) beside the south wall of the Mohawk Chapel. The fence was installed to prevent relic-hunters removing bits of the tomb.
Joseph Brant died on his property at the head of Lake Ontario; his body was reinterred here in 1850. Though his reputation suffered during his lifetime as a result of the enemies he’d made, there is little doubt that he was a towering figure in the history of the Grand River and, indeed, of Canada.
His son Capt. John Brant with John Norton led the Mohawks in several decisive engagements in the War of 1812. In 1828, John Brant was appointed resident superintendent for the Six Nations of the Grand River. In 1830, he was elected to the Legislative Assembly, the first Native to sit in Upper Canada’s parliament. But a year later, as he did not own a sufficient amount of property, he was removed from office. He died at the Mohawk Village in a cholera epidemic.
The gravestone to the right of the main tomb is dedicated to Catherine Croghan (Adonwentishon) Brant (1759-1837), Joseph Brant’s wife and John Brant’s mother.
520. (Top) The Woodland Cultural Centre is at 184 Mohawk Street in Brantford, west of the Mohawk Chapel. It’s a museum, art gallery, and event space with a focus on the Haudenosaunee wordview and on preserving Indigenous identity. It’s open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 am – 4:00 pm, entry by donation.
(Bottom) The Haldimand Coupe (2015) by multidisciplinary artist Kelly Greene. This “Broken Classic” is an eye-catching installation in front of the Woodland Centre. Among other things, it surely represents the lack of progress made in recompensing Six Nations for so many losses associated with the Haldimand Grant.
521. A tableau in the Woodlands Museum showing life in a palisaded Attawandaron (Neutral-Iroquoian) village in the Woodland period before European contact. There’s a division of labour: in the village the women care for children, grow crops, make clothing and pottery; the men leave the village to hunt and fish.
522. An illustration imagining the Attawandaron reacting to the visit in 1626 of Father Joseph de la Roche Daillon, a Franciscan missionary. Chief Souharissen with his arm raised greets one of the first European visitors to this stretch of the Grand River.
523. The Magna Carta or Constitution of the League of Five Nations as symbolized by this arrangement of strung shell beads. “The two entwined strings represent the Great Peace and the Great Law established by the Five Nations around 1452 … the longer string in the Onondaga section represents the Chief who is appointed Keeper of all records.”
524. The Museum also displays a number of items that reveal the fascination of the white world, sometimes ludicrously misplaced, with North American First Nations. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which toured the US and Europe, was one of the biggest international attractions during the period 1883-1915, and featured many Native performers. This poster dates from 1908.
525. Just east of the Woodland Centre is the Mohawk Institute. This was founded in 1828 as an Anglican day school for boys from nearby Mohawk Village, then transitioned into a coeducational residential school in the early 1830s. It was the first residential school in Canada, and about 15,000 students attended before it closed in 1970.
The supposed aim of residential schools like this was to educate Native students in English and Christianize them, so making them readier to be assimilated into white society. The reality was that the staff deliberately stripped Native children, who had sometimes been forcibly removed from parental care, of their language, culture, and traditions. Too often such schools were sites of appalling abuse of pupils by staff, under the aegis of religion.
After the forced resettlement of Six Nations to the reserve in 1850, the original building burned down in 1854, but was rebuilt. In 1885 children from other First Nations were accepted here. In 1903 the school again was burned down, probably by the students, and was rebuilt as it is today. The Canadian Government took over running of the school in 1922, which by 1955 had 150 students. In 1970 the school closed for good and the buildings were taken over by Six Nations.
Physical and sexual abuse characterized most Canadian Indian residential schools, and this one was no exception. It was known as the Mush Hole, so unappetizing were the meals. Students who tried to run away were often confined in the dark for days as punishment. There are stories of punitive electric shocks and systematic sexual violence in the basement by staff on students. It’s been estimated that at least 105 students died from illness or injury while at this school. A search for unmarked graves of students buried in the grounds is under way, as many such graves have been discovered at other Canadian residential schools.
When Six Nations took over the closed Institute, they were left in a quandary. Some wanted the building razed to the ground, given the evil deeds perpetrated there. But others felt that it should be preserved in a way that would properly memorialize its victims. The latter won the argument with their “Save the Evidence” campaign, and the Institute will reopen as a museum and part of Mohawk Village Memorial Park on 30 September 2025, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
526. (Top and bottom) In the Institute grounds, a circle of children’s shoes memorializes the young victims of the residential school system.
527. This sign on Mohawk Street is all that’s left of Kanata Village. A recreated pre-contact Indigenous Village with longhouse and hedge maze, it won the Best New Ontario Attraction in 2000. However, the longhouse was burned down by an arsonist in 2003. Later the site was occupied by Mohawks to assert their ownership of this land, which they claimed had never been ceded to Brantford. So far Kanata Village has not been revived. There is a small Reserve, Glebe Farm, just across the former canal from this site, a survival from the days of Mohawk Village.
528. A footbridge spans the remains of the former Brantford Canal and its towpath on the Shallow Creek Trail. For a map of the former canal, see #514 above.
In Upper Canada in the 1820s, transporting bulk trade goods on what few rough roads existed was difficult, to say the least. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, was a transformational moment both for the American Midwest and for New York City, the canal’s terminus. Canals thereafter came to be seen as the solution to the problem of opening up trade routes to and from newly settled territory. The Welland Canal, opened 1829, almost miraculously climbed the Niagara Escarpment, bypassing Niagara Falls. It connected the Upper Great Lakes to Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River, and the Atlantic. It would be improved and extended right through to recent times.
Newly settled communities on the lower Grand looked at their big river anew. Surely it could be used to transport goods to Lake Erie, and from there via the Welland Canal to Lake Ontario? As we have seen, Absalom Shade of Galt had shipped goods by “arks” – flat-bottomed boats suitable for use in shallow water – down the Grand and then via the Welland Canal system to Port Dalhousie and on to Dundas via springtime high water in 1831 and 1832 (see #371 above). But his attempt in 1833 was foiled by low water. Sufficient water levels on the Grand simply could not be relied upon.
529. A former wetland, Mohawk Lake was formed when the Brantford Canal was opened in 1848.
The up-and-coming town of Brantford believed that it was best suited to be the “Head of Navigation” on the Grand. However, it was clear that the river had to be made more permanently navigable. Aside from fluctuating water levels, there were rapids downtown and others downstream, and then there was the enormous loop of the oxbow, that added miles to the trip. What if a canal were cut from downtown Brantford that would remove these obstacles? Locks would be needed at a few places downstream to maintain high water. But surely all Brantford needed to do would be to upgrade the navigability of the Grand at a modest cost in order to gain a trade link with Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, and points east? William Hamilton Merritt,* the leading spirit behind the Welland Canal, exerted his considerable influence behind the scenes to encourage the citizens of Brantford to set up and invest in a Grand River Navigation Company. After all, future shipping from Brantford down the Grand would need to use his Welland Canal.
*For much more on Merritt and the Welland Canal, please see my photoblog Hiking the Welland Canal.
530. The remains of a lock on the former canal, looking toward Mohawk Road.
The result, if not a fiasco, was certainly a disappointment. The Grand River Navigation Company (GRNC) was incorporated in 1832. Five locks were built at various sites downstream from Brantford to overcome rapids and other obstacles. By 1842 steamers were plying the lower Grand. Starting in 1843, a new canal from downtown Brantford to the Grand was cut, requiring three more locks. On 6 November 1848 the Brantford Canal was opened, and the Grand was now navigable for sixty miles from downtown Brantford to Dunnville. By 1850 paddlewheel steamers plied from Brantford to Buffalo in 48 hours, stopping at Newport, Caledonia, Cayuga, and Dunnville. Deck fare was $1.50, cabin fare $2.50.
But then, in 1854, the Buffalo, Brantford and Goderich Railway was opened. The Railway Age had begun, and only those few canals which could handle oceangoing vessels would survive as viable operations. By 1861 the GRNC was bankrupt. The Brantford Canal, locks and all, slowly fell into dereliction.
531. The point, now in dense bush, where the former Brantford Canal (foreground) joins the Grand.
But that’s not the whole story. Sir John Colborne, Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada (1828-36) had had a plan to grant Six Nations a large ownership of shares in the GRNC, perhaps to alleviate Native fears that their land would be inundated by the navigation works. Bruce Emerson Hill, in his book The Grand River Navigation Company (1994), provides detailed evidence that the funds used to purchase these shares and spent to maintain the failing GRNC for thirty years were what remained of the proceeds of Six Nations’ land sales and surrenders. These funds were held in trust by the Government of Upper Canada, and disbursed without Six Nations’ approval – indeed, almost certainly without their knowledge. The total amount paid out of Indian funds was more than £40,000, and while this gave Six Nations a commanding three-quarters of GRNC stock, this soon proved to be absolutely worthless. In other words, Six Nations’ remaining inheritance was squandered with the acquiescence of the government that was supposed to hold those funds in trust.
532. (Top) The Bird Path is a 250 metre wooded trail lined with dozens of decorated nesting boxes that begins near the junction of Locks Road and Beach Road. The trail is a community project and isn’t maintained by the city, so be aware that it might be rough going in some seasons.
(Middle) An eastern wood pewee by the Bird Path in August. Its name comes from its call, a whistled rising pe-wee. These birds don’t stay long in southern Ontario, arriving in late spring and departing south in September.
(Bottom) The Bird Path ends at this viewpoint on the Grand, just before the river begins its great turn to the right at the head of the oxbow. This is your last legitimate access to the riverbank for a while. You have to retrace your steps from here.
533. The view on a cold day in early spring from the Hamilton to Brantford Rail Trail over the Grand to fields in the oxbow.
534. (Top) The spot on the Toronto, Hamilton and Buffalo (TH&B) railway line between Brantford and Hamilton where a major landslide occurred on 22 May 1986. It closed the line for good and required the evacuation, and later demolition, of several local houses. In 1993 the rails were removed and replaced by the Hamilton to Brantford Rail Trail.
(Middle and bottom) As the yellow signs indicate, the spot still isn’t stable. Environmental assessment studies have blamed the Grand River for undercutting the slope during high water. The supposed culprit has shown no remorse. Strangely, no one seems to have blamed the TH&B for building a rail line halfway up a steep, muddy riverbank.
Holmström Ruddick 