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KEEPINGONTARIO MOVINGe History of Roads and Road Building in Ontario

KEEPING ONTARIO MOVINGe History of Roads and Road Building in OntarioROBERT BRADFORDSponsored by Ontario Road Builders Association

vContentsAuthor’s Note CHAPTER ONERoads and Transportation in Upper Canada Before 1800Early Roads and TransportationRoad Building in the 1700se First Road Crews: Labour and Statute LabourJohn Graves Simcoe and the Military Roadse First Road BuildersAsa DanforthPost RoadsCHAPTER TWOSteamships to Steam Engines: H²O Highways and the Rail Roads Colonel By and the Rideau Canale Trent-Severn Waterwaye Welland Canale Steamships Road Builders and the Segwune New Iron HighwaysCHAPTER THREERoads and Road Building in Nineteenth Century OntarioBuilding Roads in the 1800s Road Building Becomes a Science

KEEPING ONTARIO MOVINGviCanada Invents Plank RoadsPlenty of Pavement Choices John Talbot and the Talbot Road e Huron Roade Toronto-Sydenham Roade Colonization Roadse Addington Road and Madawaska Bridgee Toll Gate StagecoachesCHAPTER FOURBuilding BridgesReinforced Concrete Competes With Steel Some Came Tumbling DownCHAPTER FIVEHighways for the Motor Car (1900–29)e Good Roads MovementA New Department for Highways Ontario Road Builders Unite Prot and ProtectionismDaily Commercial NewsOntario’s First Concrete HighwayAsphalt Pavements Come of Agee Ferguson HighwayCHAPTER SIXCompanies and Contractors (1887–1919)1882: Walker Brothers Industries1897: Bermingham Construction1890s: Hacquoil Construction Limited1900: A. Cope & Sons Limited (Cope Construction Ltd., 1978)1902: Warren Bituminous Paving Company Limited (Warren Paving & Materials Ltd., 1979)1903: John Ganey Construction Co. Limited 1904: L.J. Looby, Contractor (Looby Construction Ltd.)1907: Stacey Electric Company Limited

CONTENTSvii1912: Duerin Construction Company) (originally Franceschini Construction1917: A.E. Jupp Construction Company1917: W.D. LaFlamme Limited (Bot Construction and David S. LaFlamme Construction)1918: McGinnis & O’Connor Limited (e Cruickshank Group)1910s: Law Construction Co. Limited1910s: Standard Industries LimitedCHAPTER SEVENCompanies and Contractors (1920–29)1920: Curran & Briggs Limited (originally Curran & Clement)1921: Black & McDonald Limited1926: e Murray Group Limited1927: Campbell Construction Co. (George Campbell Company Ltd., 1946)1927: E&E Seegmiller Limited1928: W.W. King Engineering and Contracting (King Paving & Materials)1929: Armstrong Brothers Company (Armbro, 1972, Aecon, 1987)1929: Canada Paving and Supply Corporation Limited1929: Greenwood Construction Co. Limited 1920s: McNamara CorporationCHAPTER EIGHTSteam to Diesel to Hydraulics A Game ChangerR.G. LeTourneauGolden Age EquipmentBigger Crawler TractorsMade in Ontarioe Iron DealersCollecting the RentGoing Once, Going Twice, Sold

KEEPING ONTARIO MOVINGviiiCHAPTER NINE The Great Depression and World War II (1930–49)Muskeg, Mountains, and Mosquitos: Building the Alaska Highwaye Queen Elizabeth Way and the Rainbow Bridgee ousand Islands Bridge(s)CHAPTER TEN Companies and Contractors (1930–44)1930s: Dibblee Construction Limited1930s: Lamothe, a division of Sintra Inc. 1933: Smiths Construction1937: H.J. McFarland Construction Co. Limited1938: Dagmar Construction Inc.1938: Lavis Contracting Co. Limited 1938: Pioneer Construction Inc.1939: Leo Alarie & Sons Limited (Aecon Group)1942: C.A. Pitts Engineering Limited1942: Labelle Brothers (M.J. Labelle Co. Ltd, 1955)CHAPTER ELEVEN Companies and Contractors (1945–49)1946: Cox Construction Limited1946: K.J. Beamish Construction Co. Limited1946: Miller Paving Limited (also McAsphalt Industries Ltd., 1969)1946: Owen King Limited1947: McLean Construction (McLean Taylor Construction Ltd.) 1948: Huron Construction Co. Limited (e Miller Group)1949: Cornwall Gravel Company Limited 1949: Fowler Construction Company Limited1949: S. McNally & Sons (McNally Construction Inc. and C&M McNally Engineering Corp., 1979)1940s: Harnden & King Limited1940s: Hurdman Paving1940s: Peter Kiewit Sons Co.Other Contractors from the Forties and Fifties

1Roads and Transportation in Upper Canada Before 1800Before the New World was “discovered” by Europeans in the seventeenth century and recog-nized for its commercial potential, Ontario wasn’t a part of any new world at all. For at least 12,000 years the dense deciduous and pine forests and pristine lakes and rivers of Ontario were home to Aboriginal people. ey took their living from the forests and lakes and they spread throughout Ontario on the waterways. ey moved on land between hunting grounds and water access points on networks of centuries-old forest trails, and they established their settlements at the intersections of their trails.The first European settlers in Ontario arrived to find a land of lakes and forests — over 71 million hectares from the deciduous hardwoods in the south to the coniferous boreal regions of the north.CHAPTER ONE

Many dierent Native nations inhabited their own parts of the province in the 1600s and 1700s, when exploitation of its natural resources got underway on a major scale. In the southern parts, the Iroquois Nation, which had migrated north from its traditional lands in New York State, inhab-ited areas around Lake Simcoe and north. It included the Hurons, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and the Seneca. e Algonkian natives that became the Six Nations included the Cree, Ojibwa, and Algonquin peoples. Native people also travelled deep into the north of Ontario to settle in places where some still dwell today and which modern civilization has still not quite reached.en the Europeans came, rst the French and later the British, who coveted the virtual ne fur factory that Ontario represented, just as a modern producer of aggregates would covet a licensed quarry with an endless supply of stone. e native furs — beaver was the Cadillac of the fur trade, but bear, sea otter, ermine, and deer pelts were also prized in Europe — were worth a small fortune and became symbols of wealth and entitlement on the streets of Paris and London. e commercial potential of the province to Europeans was so valued that wars and local battles were fought o and on for over 100 years before the British nally established control of what would become Ontario under the Treaty of Paris in 1763.e Europeans brought common manufactured goods with them to trade with the natives for their furs. ey also set the province on an irreversible new course that would change life for the Aboriginal people in ways they could not imagine at the time. e new tools, iron axe heads, brass kettles, factory-made blankets, and many other simple products cheaply pumped out of industri-alized European factories had huge impacts on Aboriginal life and culture, some positive and most not very positive at all. Disease was one of the things Europeans brought with them, viruses to which the natives had never been exposed, and the death toll was enormous. Before the European settlers arrived, Ontario was home to Aboriginal nations that hunted, fished, and foraged for food.

KEEPING ONTARIO MOVING4A fur trader’s cabin.

ROADS AND TRANSPORTATION IN UPPER CANADA BEFORE 18005the U.S. and settled in southern Ontario following the American Revolutionary War, which ended in 1783. About 9,000 loyalists had come to nd a new life in Upper Canada by 1784. A group of the rst loyalists came from the north-eastern American states to Montreal and made their way by barge and portage along the St. Lawrence River to settle along the river between Montreal and Kingston. e latter, called Cataraqui at the time by the Mississauga First Nations who had rst settled there, was a prime beneciary of the inux of loyalists, and it quickly became the major military and eco-nomic centre of Upper Canada at the time. Cataraqui had the highest population in Upper Canada until the 1840s. It was also the rst settlement surveyed in Upper Canada. Under the direction of Surveyor-General Major Samuel Holland, deputy John Collins divided up the lands west of old Fort Frontenac into townships of 175 lots of 120 acres each, with allow-ances for roads. e rst major section of road in eastern Ontario was built in 1783 between Cataraqui and Bath to the west.Another inux of loyalists crossed the border at Niagara Falls and Fort Erie to establish a settlement at Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake) and spread across the Niagara Peninsula. ey built their rst road from Newark to Ancaster in 1785. A third wave of loyal-ists and some early settlers from Europe chose not to proceed along the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes water system, choosing rather to branch o to begin settling another major water artery, the Ottawa River. By about 1800 they had established a settlement at the current site of the city of Ottawa and were pushing further up the Ottawa River, the feeder rivers of which were gateways to the North and transport routes for the timber trade that would dominate the early history of the Ottawa Valley.Until 1791, what we know as Ontario today was all just part of the British holdings in North America. It ocially became a geographic entity in that year by an Act of British Parliament that created two provinces. Lower Canada represented the modern-day province of Quebec. Most of its settlers were descendants of the original French explorers who began to colonize the area in the early 1600s. Upper Canada would later be called Ontario, but at the time the map did not include vast territories of the northern and western parts of the modern Ontario. Educated estimates put the population of the province at about 6,000 in 1783, growing to 14,000 in 1791, and reaching 44,000 by 1806.While the fur trade continued to fuel settlement and territorial expansion in Upper Canada in the mid-1700s, there was a growing demand in Europe for wood products, especially to support the shipbuilding business in England. e homeland was constantly at war with one nation or another in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and at the same time as they were losing a lot of ships in battle, their traditional sources of lumber in Eastern Europe were drying up. It was only natural that forestry would become an economic mainstay in a colony virtually covered in thick forest but Fresh beaver and other pelts are packaged and waiting for shipment in the stock room at a remote trading post.

KEEPING ONTARIO MOVING6for the myriad of connecting lakes and rivers that provided the means of moving timber from the woodlot to market. e rst settlements were developed along the major water routes, and a saw-mill was usually one of the rst commercial establishments in a new settlement, after a grist mill and along with a general store and a post oce. e timber trade grew steadily and did eventually become the number one economic engine of Upper Canada as the demand for fur began to decline in the early 1800s.Early Roads and Transportatione Europeans found the water transportation routes established by the Native peoples centuries ago — navigating the rivers and lakes by canoe in the summer and following the frozen waterways in the winter — to be practical and eective, so they set up their communities on the shores of the water highways and continued to embrace the mode in settling the province. Water was not only the best way to travel and move heavy goods and timber in the 1700s — it was virtually the only way. In a province where six percent of the territory consisted of networks of rivers and over 250,000 lakes, initially there was little need for land roads.e St. Lawrence River, Great Lakes, and Ottawa River were the superhighways of the system, which explains the patterns of early settlement in Upper Canada with major settlements along those water routes. From Niagara, water routes took the Natives and early European explorers to Lake Erie via the Niagara River, leading to establishment of communities at centres such as Port Colborne, Port Dover, and Port Stanley along that lake. Spotty settlement then continued on to Ontario’s lakes and rivers were the primary means of transportation for first the Aboriginal nations, and then the fur traders and early European pioneers. The province has more than 250,000 lakes, nearly 4,000 greater than three square kilometres in size.

ROADS AND TRANSPORTATION IN UPPER CANADA BEFORE 18007Amherstburg at the entrance to the Detroit River and then Windsor at the other end. Windsor was an early economic powerhouse, situated as it is directly across the river from Detroit, which was an important American economic hub at the time. e route then traversed Lake St. Clair and on to a settlement at Sarnia where the St. Clair River meets Lake Huron. Continuing up the east coast of Lake Huron to the Bruce Peninsula and into Georgian Bay, early settlements were established at places like Goderich and Port Elgin. Posts in Georgian Bay were an ideal gateway to lands further north and west. Early settlers also adopted most of the Aboriginal ways of travel. For centuries they had travelled by canoe in the water or by foot on land, using well-established trails to move between hunting grounds and water access points and later to enable their fur-trading activities. For winter travel on land and on the frozen waterways, the Native peoples had developed snowshoes to get around on foot in the snow and toboggans, pulled by dogs, to move their belongings. Early settlers fol-lowed suit. Dogs as pack animals were invaluable to Native land travel, and Natives would not shift to horses until the 1700s, when those animals were introduced by Europeans. e ox was the beast of burden for the early settlers, and later horses when they became available. Sleighs became the common conveyance for people to travel in the winter over the ice roads and frozen waterways, as well as to move timber from the bush.e Native peoples had created many paths through the forests to linking water access points, and these also served the early trappers and fur traders. Notably, there was an inland network of paths and trails stretching from Montreal to the Niagara Peninsula. Far from being simply a col-lection of random paths, collectively Native trails represented a practical network of interconnected major “roads” connecting water access points and settlements, and arteries that served the Native way of life and travel well.e Native roads were little more than footpaths through the bush where the vegetation had been beaten down and eliminated over time, and perhaps some direct obstacles removed from time The canoe was perfectly suited to travelling long distances on Ontario’s network of lakes and connecting rivers. Early fur traders readily adopted the traditional Native mode of travel.

KEEPING ONTARIO MOVING8to time — generally only wide enough for human single-le passage. Heavily travelled trails were regularly worn six inches or more below grade, some up to a foot deep. Early settlers on horseback often used these Native trails in the absence of any other land conveyance, spawning the term “bridle path” because they were just wide enough to accommodate a horse and rider.But for early settlers in the 1700s who brought their horses, oxen, and wagons, the journey to their new homesteads couldn’t be made exclusively on the water routes. e last leg over land was always an arduous and dangerous ordeal that meant somehow transporting by land all of the worldly goods and supplies they would need to survive the winter. Invariably that meant hacking new trails in the dense bush and days on end searching for a way to get across a river or stream in their path. e rst family to settle the Ottawa area was the Billings family. In 1813, Lamira Billings, the family matriarch, described her journey as a new bride from the village of Merrickville to Gloucester. Following are excerpts from her recollections of the trip, which at the time could not be accom-plished on land:On the 24th (October, 1813) started the move to Gloucester, came 9 miles and was detained by the rain. 26th we started in a bark canoe, our loading consisted of Mr. Billings and a Frenchman and myself, 6 chairs, one trunk and a bed and a bundle of bedclothes. We went 18 miles and camped in an old shanty — it had a door, no window, no chimney but a large hole for each. e next morning it rained till 4 in the afternoon then we started and went 4 miles and came to another shanty of the very same kind. Remained that night, the 28th we started again and we found the water so shallow that the canoe would not swim; the men had to unload and carry the things on their backs some distance and then carry the canoe and load again. ree dierent times they had to load and unload again before we reached home 9 miles … and when we arrived, it was Footpaths in the forest were the first roads in Ontario. The Aboriginal nations developed a network over thousands of years, and some went for hundreds of kilometres.

KEEPING ONTARIO MOVING16Street, Yonge Street, and the road to York, where contract labour was used. e Rangers were formed in the United States by John Butler in 1777 as a militia of irregulars that took part in many bloody battles on behalf of the British. After the group was disbanded in 1774, many of the Rangers stayed together and came to Upper Canada to live.Post RoadsIn support of Simcoe’s obsession with moving the provincial capital of Upper Canada to London, which he never abandoned even after Dorchester made him locate it in York in 1793, he also estab-lished a post road from Burlington Bay to the ames River, at the current city of Woodstock.Post roads were common in early Upper Canada. e road between Kingston and Montreal was a post road, as was Simcoe’s Dundas Street. Post roads were simply roads that featured a regular line of “post houses” along their route where travellers could eat, rest, and change horses and vehi-cles for the next leg of their trip. Like the toll roads to follow, post houses were operated by the private sector, in much the same manner as highway rest stops are run in twenty-rst-century Ontario. e “post master” had exclusive rights to supply and charge for carriages but was obligated under the threat of penalty to have conveyances ready when they were demanded. Each post mas-ter had to have a specied number of carriages and would often have subcontractors called “aides de posto” to provide additional ones if they were needed. It being a for-prot business, travellers of the day would complain that the quality of the carriages kept by the post master was questionable, and they were often wanting of repair.e post roads enabled the introduction of the stagecoach to Upper Canada, now making it possible for the common traveller to take longer, multi-day trips by land that would previously have been virtually impossible.

17Steamships to Steam Engines: H2O Highways and the Rail RoadsAs Upper Canadians awoke to the nineteenth century, roads were barely a blip on the radar as infrastructure needed to further support the settlement and economic development of Upper Canada. As settlement necessarily pressed inland, the need for roads to serve local needs and to connect settlements was established, but their development was still a slow and ago-nizing one. e British Parliament was far more interested in continuing to improve water routes to support far north fur trading prots and the growing timber trade along the St. Lawrence and Ottawa River routes than in how settlers were to get grain to the mill or their children to school.So in the early 1800s, London embarked on an ambitious strategy to build canals in Upper Canada, signalling that for the foreseeable future transportation would continue to be water-based and the development of land roads would continue to be a distant afterthought, although in the broader sense of the denition of roads, the canals were the roadways of the day. In 1832, govern-ment loans and debentures for the Burlington and Desjardins Canals and Cobourg harbour alone were £10,478. For roads they were able to nd but £75. Adding to the British indierence to roads development was that by the mid-1800s the threat of attack from the United States or foreign powers was greatly diminished, and military roads were not the priority they were 50 years earlier.e canals were built to provide continuous water connections between the major settled areas of Upper Canada on the main water routes, and they were ideal for developing steamboat travel on the inland waterways. By extension, the canals became commercial corridors along which settle-ment could and did occur. Despite the subdued threat of war from the U.S., the canals were also built to serve the same purposes as the military roads — as secure supply lines and for troop move-ment. e fascination with canals was not limited to Upper Ontario, which embarked on a urry of construction between about 1824 and the latter part of the century. Lower Canada was building canals, too, as were the Maritimes. Even before the British government launched its canal expansion strategy, explorers and fur traders were building crude early versions of them to connect waterways and bypass rapids. Gov-ernor Haldimand had ordered a small section of locks at the rapids in the Soulanges section of the St. Lawrence River as early as 1779. In 1819, the North West Company engineered a rudimentary CHAPTER TWO

KEEPING ONTARIO MOVING18lock to manage the rapids on the St. Mary’s River, which allowed it to push its western explorations forward from Lake Superior. ree early canals were built (1819–34) on the Ottawa River. en came the government money for canals and the engineering masterpiece of the day, the Rideau Canal, completed in 1832 by Colonel By and the British military to connect Ottawa by inland waterways to Kingston. Smaller canals were completed at Cornwall and Williamsburg to manage sections of rapids on the St. Lawrence between Lake Saint-Louis and Lake Ontario. In 1895, the rapids at Sault Ste. Marie were tamed for shipping north into Lake Superior, with completion of the locks at the Sault that operated in conjunction with four locks on the American side. Colonel By and the Rideau Canal Like most other early roads, whether land or water-based, the Rideau Canal was envisioned rst and foremost as a military defense after the War of 1812 to maintain the vital links between Mon-treal and Kingston should the Americans threaten the province from the St. Lawrence River. Work started on the canal in 1826, and when it was completed six years later the Royal coers were lighter in the amount of ₤822,000. e Rideau Canal was also an important commercial corridor until 1849, when the rapids on the St. Lawrence River had all been conquered by locks and provided a

STEAMSHIPS TO STEAM ENGINES: H²O HIGHWAYS AND THE RAIL ROADS19more direct route. e Rideau Canal delivered tens of thousands of immigrants to their new set-tlements in the interior of Eastern Ontario and allowed movement of timber and grain from the farms and forests to Kingston and Montreal. In February 1817, the lieutenant governor posted a tender advertisement in several of the larger Upper Canada daily newspapers. It called for design and construction of a canal system and asked for proposals to build a navigable water route from Kingston to Ottawa, for “opening the commu-nication in the direction of the Rideau Lake, and the waters communicating from thence to Mud Lake [Newboro Lake] and from thence to Kingston.” No bids were received. Perhaps the project was seen as too risky by the contractors of the day and/or their nancial backers. Another likely reason is the fact that commercial interests were more focussed on the St. Lawrence River systems as the preferred choice for shipping.In 1825 the job of designing and building the Rideau Canal was given to British Colonel John By, who had done his military service with the Royal Engineers. e colonel has earned legendary status in engineering history for managing to complete a project many believed impossible. It stands as the most impressive civil engineering and construction project of its time: a continuous water superhighway running 202 km (125 miles) through forests, swamp, and the hard granites of the Canadian Shield, with 52 dams and 47 masonry locks.Colonel By had retired early from his military career with the Royal Engineers and was enjoy-ing a nice pension in England when he got the call back to active duty to take charge of the Rideau Canal project. We aren’t sure how he felt about being roused from a life of leisure to build a canal in the backwoods of the colony, but the next year he landed in Quebec City. He soon moved to The Rideau Canal was an engineering marvel when it was built in the early 1800s. Today it is a major Ottawa tourist attraction and recreational water corridor.

KEEPING ONTARIO MOVING22waterway until over 100 years later. In 1884, the Murray Canal was built at Trenton to make the short, direct link between the Bay of Quinte and the western shore of Lake Ontario.Construction began in the Kawartha Lakes region in 1833 with the lock at Bobcaygeon. Despite its protracted development, as it progressed the Trent-Severn Waterway it did serve the timber trade and provide economic stimulus along its route. But by the time one could nally pass continuously through the waterway from Lake Ontario to Georgian Bay in 1920 any serious opportunities as an economic corridor had long since passed it by. Not only did the railways snatch up those opportuni-ties along the way, but the beginnings of a road-based highway system were also developing in Ontario. e Trent-Severn was obsolete as an economic driver before it ever became a signicant one, especially with completion of the Welland Canal in 1932. Today the waterway serves the province as a 386-km recreational waterway, with about 32 km of built channels, 44 locks, 39 swing bridges, and 160 control dams. e various locks and dams along its route are also important for the local generation of hydroelectricity.The Welland Canale Welland Canal proved over time to be the most important and most successful of the continu-ous waterway routes created in the 1800s in terms of improving shipping through the Great Lakes system and providing local economic stimulus in the Niagara Peninsula. ere have been four Welland Canals over the past 180 years, each successively rening the original route, reducing the The Kingston harbour and waterfront is depicted in an engraving from about 1850.

STEAMSHIPS TO STEAM ENGINES: H2O HIGHWAYS AND THE RAIL ROADS23A drawbridge on the modern-day Welland Canal.

KEEPING ONTARIO MOVING24number of locks and enlarging them in response to the continually increasing size of the cargo vessels that used them.e rst Welland Canal was built between 1824 and 1829 by William Hamilton Merrick to bypass Niagara Falls. It ran 27 miles (44 km) between Port Weller on Lake Ontario and Port Colborne on Lake Erie, and the canal virtually replaced the Old Portage land route between Queenston and Chippawa. Merrick’s Welland Canal Co. operated the system of locks as a toll road for cargo ships but found the maintenance costs made it a shaky business proposition, and owner-ship was purchased by the government in 1841. e economic power of the new waterway detour around Niagara Falls was proven quickly with the development of inland towns and cities along its route. Mills were built near the locks and signicant industrial development occurred in towns like Welland, orold, Merritton, Port Colborne, and Port Robinson. Two further reconstructions of the canal took place in 1845 and 1872–91 before the fourth and the current Welland Canal was completed in 1932, nally bringing it to world-class standards and establishing it as one of the most successful commercial waterways in the world. e canal now runs 27 miles (43.4 km) from Port Weller to Port Colborne. It has eight ship locks, each 80 feet (24.4 m) wide and 766 feet (233.5 m) long and with a depth of 25.8 feet (7.6 m). Between 1967 and 1978, over 50 million cubic yards of earth were excavated and removed to create a Welland By-Pass. Part of that project to relieve the impact of the canal bridges on the city included construction of two car/rail tunnels underneath the canal bypass.The Steamshipse steamships of the 1800s were to the water transportation routes and canal systems what cars and trucks are to paved highways today. e canals were built as their dedicated highways to the interior and the rst steamship — the Frontenac — appeared on Lake Ontario in 1816. e rst steamer on the upper Ottawa River was the 25 horsepower Lady Colborne, built in 1833 for ser-vice between Aylmer and Chats Falls. e introduction of the steamboat to Upper Canada further cemented the waterways as the primary transportation mode of the time. ey could move heavy cargoes not only on the Great Lakes but also on the inland rivers and canals. e steamships oered a much-improved way of moving people, too, making the journey for new settlers much easier than a land excursion if they could aord it. In the mid-1800s the Colonization Roads and consequent new settlements provided the gate-way to the jumping-o points for the North from centres like Gravenhurst and Bracebridge. ere were no roads leading deeper into the new territories, and the steamships were the only way to travel further north. e steamships were not only the lifeline for settlers, but later in the 1880s became the method of conveyance for well-to-do Americans and Ontario city folk who could aord to summer in the wilds of the North. eir wilderness adventure vacations were often com-plete with all of the comforts and luxuries of home at the grand resorts like Windermere and Cleveland’s House that were developed along the water routes.e rst steamship to leave a wake in the waters of Lake Simcoe was a small one built by a partnership of estate owners at Kempenfeldt Bay at Holland Landing and launched in 1832. e Sir John Colborne immediately lled a demand for transporting freight and people around Lake Simcoe, but was not able to progress further into the system because it drew too much water to get through the narrows to Lake Couchiching. e next steamer built to handle commercial trac on Lake Simcoe was the Peter Robinson, and this time the builders made sure it would be able to navigate the narrows. In the same year as the rst steamer put into Lake Simcoe, in 1832 the rst small steamer — the Penetanguishene — ran between the military settlement there to Coldwater. Early steamers on

STEAMSHIPS TO STEAM ENGINES: H2O HIGHWAYS AND THE RAIL ROADS25Georgian Bay in the 1840s were stationed at Penetanguishene to serve military purposes, but by 1855 steamships were making regular runs between Collingwood and Owen Sound.Road Builders and the SegwunAn interesting footnote to the history of Ontario road builders is their contribution to the preser-vation of the history of steamboats as the rst methods of transport in the North and other parts of the province. Between 1973 and 1981 the Ontario Road Builders’ Association (ORBA) saved the Royal Mail Steamship Segwun, the only vessel of her type still aoat and operating under steam in North America. At 2011 ceremonies marking the 30th anniversary of the Segwun’s return to service, local historian and steamship expert Richard Tatley suggested the road builders help to preserve steamship history to assuage guilt about their roads bringing an end to an era where steam-ships were the primary mode of transportation in the Muskoka area — a notion the road builders suggest is more romantic legend than truth.“By acting as corporate sponsors of the restoration and seeing it through to a successful com-pletion, your organization saved a priceless piece of Canada from oblivion and made it possible for present-day patrons to experience once again the delights of steamship travel on the beautiful Muskoka lakes in old-time style,” Tatley told the road builders’ representatives at the ceremonies, in presenting an original watercolour of the venerable old steamship to ORBA president Tom O’Callaghan of Fowler Construction. e Segwun was built in 1887 as a side-wheeler and was rst called the Nipissing. It operated for over 90 years before it was almost sold for scrap in 1962. In 1969, the drive to restore the Segwun The Royal Mail Steamship Segwun (left) was reconditioned by the Ontario Road Builders’ Association, and when it returned to service as a tourist attraction in the 1980s, it was the only vessel of its type in North America operating under steam power.

KEEPING ONTARIO MOVING26was red up by John Coulter, a marine engineer with a passion for the project. ere was no money, though, until Bill Cole, then a director of the road builders’ association from C.A. Pitts Ltd., got involved and raised $24,000 of seed money from ORBA members to kick-start the work. Later, ORBA president Glen Coates of Fowler Construction took over leadership of the project for the road builders. It cost $250,000 to rebuild the hull, and in the summer of 1974 Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau christened the Segwun’s return to the water at the Gravenhurst docks. ere was a lot more work left to do, however, more than anyone had imagined, and by the time the steam engines had been rebuilt and the interior renovated, the total cost was $1.1 million. Work progressed slowly because the road builders had to raise the funds from their member com-panies, and the price tag just kept getting bigger and bigger. e Ontario government came through with $250,000, and the rest was nanced by the road builders. By 1985, though, the Segwun was plying the Muskoka waterways once again as a premier tourist attraction in the area.The New Iron Highwayse railways changed everything. ey burst on the Ontario transportation scene in the mid-1800s, grew fast and furiously, and created a revolution in both freight and passenger transport, essentially leading the shift from water to land for inland transportation. e rst Ontario railway made its maiden run from Toronto to Machell’s Corners (Aurora) on May 16, 1853 — met by cheer-Rapid expansion of the railways in Ontario after 1850 was the beginning of the end for the steamships and water-ways as the province’s primary mode of transportation.

STEAMSHIPS TO STEAM ENGINES: H2O HIGHWAYS AND THE RAIL ROADS27ing throngs and reworks celebrations at each end. By 1856 the trains were operating on regular schedules in the Montreal-to-Toronto corridor.Ontario’s earliest introduction to rail goes back to at least 1827, when the reader will recall that Colonel By used wooden rail lines to haul stones from a quarry at Hog’s Back Road for his construction of the Rideau Canal. In 1839 there was a horse-powered tramway operating between Queenston and Chippawa on the Niagara River. But the real rail revolution came with steam engines and, beginning about 1850, over the next half century the railways would gradually replace water transportation as the primary mode in Ontario.Roads, which might have received more prominence as the need for inland transportation grew in the 1800s, continued to be virtually ignored as the railways became solidly entrenched as the preferred way to travel and transport freight over long distances on land. ey could carry anything and as much of it as there was to carry, and the rail infrastructure to connect the major ports and economic centres of the province came quickly. While the building of new highways suered initially due to the limelight enjoyed by railways, as the trains began to connect major centres in the prov-ince an interdependent relationship developed that has lasted to the modern day and has received renewed attention in the early twenty-rst century. e railways could move things between major points, but roads were needed to feed the rail lines in local areas.As did the water highways before them, the railways led settlement and growth of communities along their routes. In the case of the rst train to Aurora, author Elizabeth Willmot, in her book The railway opened up vast new tracts of Ontario to timber and mineral resources and spawned new settlements in its path.

STEAMSHIPS TO STEAM ENGINES: H2O HIGHWAYS AND THE RAIL ROADS29railway was established to take it to shipping ports. In 1902 the Northern Ontario nally got some attention from the provincial government, which could no longer ignore the importance of north-ern development. By act of provincial parliament, in 1902 the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway Commission was created as a Crown corporation to develop the Ontario Northland Rail-way. e railway started in North Bay and reached New Liskeard by 1905, Englehart a year later, and Cochrane the year after that. e Grand Trunk Railway was the rst railway heavyweight in the province. It was founded in 1852 to build a main trunk line between Portland, Maine and Sarnia, Ontario, via Montreal and Toronto. On its formation, the Grand Trunk assumed the rights to the Montreal & Kingston Railway Company and the Kingston & Toronto Railway Company and completed the Montreal-Toronto corridor by 1856. In the same year it opened a Toronto-Goderich line, through the amalgamation of the ve regional railways and leasing the rights to two others. e Grand Trunk also built lines between Guelph and Stratford in 1856, to St. Marys in 1858, and to Point Edward in 1859.2 ere were no obvious contenders to usurp the Grand Trunk’s dominance in Ontario until the Canadian Pacic Railway came along in 1881. e CPR was established to build a trans-continental railway, as much a political imperative to meet promises of uniting the new country from sea to sea on Confederation as from its potential commercial opportunities. Railway expansion in the second half of the 1800s led to signicant advances in related civil infrastructure, in particular bridges strong enough to support them across longer spans. e Grand Trunk constructed a bridge across the Niagara River between Fort Erie and Bualo, New York to complete its Canada-U.S. rail connections, as well as the Victoria Bridge in 1860, which was the rst to traverse the St. Lawrence River at Montreal. Transportation policy and strategies in Ontario in the nineteenth century had little to do with settlement in the province and everything to do with supporting the military and commercial inter-ests of the time — the fur and timber trades in particular. e fact that settlement did follow new transportation routes was a natural outcome, but it wasn’t planned, and providing land roads to support them was not part of the agenda. e rst half of the century is marked by expansion of the water routes and building of canals to enhance them and the latter half by a wholesale shift to land-based transport and reliance on railroads. Generally, developing communities were left to build their own roads, and that was limited to how much could be expected of individual settlers in terms of funding and their labour.But things were about to change again in the twentieth century. People would begin a lasting love aair with the automobile, and Henry Ford would make it easy to own one. Governments would no longer be able to ignore public demands for more and better roads.

31Roads and Road Building in the Nineteenth CenturyBy the early 1800s, construction of roads had become imperative to connect major settlements to neighbouring communities in Upper Canada by land and to facilitate settlement into new areas without water access, although they didn’t come as quickly as they should have because nobody had yet come up with a good way to pay for them. e rst inux of immigrants was the United Empire Loyalists from the United States after 1784 and into the early 1800s who settled along the St. Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers and in the Niagara area. After Upper Canada was created in 1791, connecting these groups of early settlements was a priority of early roads planning. e next wave of new Ontarians was the European settlers escaping poor economies and hope-less lives in their homelands in the early 1800s and looking for a chance at a better life in Upper Canada. e population of Upper Canada tripled to 450,000 from 1825 to 1842, and then dou-bled again to 952,000 by 1851. e early European settlers were about 60 percent Irish and the rest were an even split between English and Scots, as well as a few from other countries like Poland and Hungary. German settlers came to Southwestern Ontario very early in the century, following a new road from Dundas to Waterloo County in their Conestoga wagons. Later, the appeal of the New World would also attract settlers from other European homelands.At a time when the wagons and carts used to travel on Upper Canadian roads came in almost as many congurations as there were the settlers who built them, the Conestoga wagons used by the German immigrants were the Cadillacs of the day. ey were built like boats, high on the sides and low in the middle because that was how loads shifted on rough roads. e wagons were covered with cloth on arched frames typical of the familiar covered wagons that opened up the American west and could be up to 30 feet long, with large rear wheels more than ve feet in diameter. ey could carry relatively enormous payloads of as much as eight tons when pulled by a team of six good horses.1 Upper Canada’s local economies in the mid-1800s were mainly agricultural with the staple being wheat. is gradually shifted to fruit and vegetables and dairy farming. People also started a migration to the cities in the middle of the century, and as they did a new textile trade, the manu-facturing of farm implements, and even some heavy industries provided the jobs. By the end of the century, the railways had opened up new opportunities to the North, and the mining and natural resource sectors ourished. CHAPTER THREE

KEEPING ONTARIO MOVING32By 1821 there was a reasonable network of rudimentary roads connecting major parts of the province, without considering the actual condition of those roads. The major ones in Upper Canada at the time included:• Dundas Street from Dundas to London, passing through Woodstock.• e road extending Dundas Street from Dundas to York and then on to Kingston.• From Kingston an arterial road ran southwest into Fredericksburg, but the main highway continued east along the bank of the St. Lawrence River to Vaudreuil. From Vaudreuil, a branch road followed the Ottawa River west to Longueil.• Just east of the Kingston road, another road ran up to Gower Township on both sides of the Rideau River, with branch roads to Perth and Brockville.• e Talbot Road from Amherstburg at the western end of the province, along the north shore of Lake Erie and linking to Dundas Street at Brantford, then continuing south to Port Dover, and then east to Fort Erie.• A road from Queenston west to Ancaster, crossing the Grand River at Port Dover, then running southwest to Amherstburg.• e Richmond Road between Perth and Richmond.• Yonge Street from York to Holland Landing.Other important post roads were created as they were made necessary by the inland migration of settlers. One ran north from Brockville and Hurontario Road, providing a route from Port The Conestoga wagon.

KEEPING ONTARIO MOVING34among their wandering household goods with a baby at her breast; a picture of forlorn, dejected patience; the team of oxen crouching down mournfully in the mud, and breathing forth such clouds of vapour from their mouths and nostrils that all the damp mist and fog around seemed to have come direct from them.4Building a road in Ontario in the early 1800s was a pretty basic exercise. First the surveyors went in and determined the path of the road, notching the trees on either side to mark it. ey went into the bush with compasses and then started to improvise. Experience and intuition were their tools when they needed to deal with rock outcrops or obstructions that were easier to go around than through. On encountering a river or stream, sometimes a detour to a fordable spot made more sense than to build a bridge to stay on course. e surveyors rarely got the recognition they deserved but they arguably had the most dicult jobs. ey were the toughest of the tough; experienced woodsmen who could withstand the rigours of life in the wilderness. eir work usually took place in the dead of winter and early spring when they could traverse the swamps and watercourses on foot. ey could be gone for months at a time, living where they stopped for the night, hunting and foraging for food along the way. After the surveyors came the men with axes to fell the trees on the marked path and crews of men and oxen following behind them to clear the right of way. Stumps were removed with chains where possible and left in the ground if not. Infrequently, the road builder would try to burn out the larger stumps. at was pretty well all there was to building a new dirt road through the forest. Early road workers heating a tar-like surfacing material in a steam kettle and placing it by hand.

KEEPING ONTARIO MOVING36McAdam’s roads started with layers of larger stone on the virgin base, and he concentrated on the ner gradation sieves for the top course stone layer because it would improve compaction and therefore water penetration. His system called for a repair program when early use of the road showed imperfections. Not surprisingly, the maintenance aspect rarely occurred, so his pave-ments were sometimes criticized for their lack of longevity when neglect, not poor design, was the real culprit. Nobody could dispute the superiority of a macadam pavement in the 1800s, but Ontario didn’t give them a serious look until near the end of the century and into the 1900s. Until motor vehicles would make better roads imperative, macadam was too expensive. A main aspect of McAdam’s system was his theory that steady trac after installation was necessary to compact the ne stone surface course so it could serve its purpose as an impervious layer to keep water from migrating to the base. In Ontario in the 1800s there was not nearly enough trac on the roads to achieve his prescribed post-construction compaction. McAdam also often used water as a binder for his roads, and later in the 1800s when bitumen-based binders became available his road designs were improved further. Roads of McAdam’s basic design that used bitumen binders were called “tarmacadam” roads, more familiar today as tarmac. e rst one was laid in Paris, France, in 1854, using natural bituminous materials. Canada also had its own roads guru in omas Roy, a civil engineer who published a paper in 1841 detailing how to design and built a good pavement. Roy was in the McAdam camp and on the introduction of plank roads a few years earlier had argued that macadam roads would prove the most cost-eective over the longer term. Roy’s theory on pavement selection was that unless there were extenuating factors, the best pavement was the one that was the least expensive to build and maintain. His work demonstrates some of the earliest attention to life cycle costs in the design and construction of roads.Roy’s emphasis on cost eciency showed many of the prevailing road building techniques to be lacking. His ideal roads would use levelling stakes at close intervals to minimize excavations and embankments and balance them as closely as possible, realizing the cost savings in managing these aspects. Typical road allowances of the day were 66 feet wide, but Roy recommended that 48 feet would be plenty; 38 feet for the road, ve feet for a drainage ditch on one side and ve feet for a footpath on the other side. His research also showed that a longer-lasting road could be built by making the centre of the road stronger than the sides because that was the part that took the worst beating from the horses or oxen and the wagon wheels.If one were to build a road the way Roy thought it should be built — with initial cost eciency and long-term durability at top of mind — he gured it would cost between £220 and £280 per mile, much more than most roads of the day cost to build but an investment he believed would pay o in the long run.5Canada Invents Plank RoadsIn the late 1830s Canadians developed an innovation in road building that quickly spread to the United States. e “plank road” was constructed of sawed wooden planks up to four inches thick laid across the road bed and attached with spikes to longitudinal stringers on both sides. Stringers were sometimes also used on the bottom of the plank surface to provide extra stability where the horses’ hooves and wagon wheels did the most damage. Drainage ditches were critical to the technology, and the plank roads were covered with dirt or sand to improve friction and protect the surface.It’s generally believed that the relatively quick fall from grace of the plank roads related both to growing competition from the railways and rising timber prices. It was also discovered that the

ROADS AND ROAD BUILDING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY37plank roads deteriorated quickly under the pounding of the horses’ hooves and beating from the wagon wheels. After a year or two a plank road needed repair, and in that day there was no such thing as a road maintenance program, so they just got worse until in the end most became unus-able. ey were also susceptible to winter frosts that caused heaving and cracking of the planks.People liked plank roads because they were innitely more comfortable and safer to ride on, they were a lot easier on horses and wagons, and they made for a usable road in the summer and fall when dirt and corduroy roads became impassable. A horse and carriage could do up to eight miles an hour on a plank road, while two miles per hour was about all one could manage on a corduroy road. White and yellow pine were the preferred woods for plank roads since they were said to last longer than other varieties, but abundant maple, elm, and other woods were also used successfully. Added to their other benets, it was a bonus that plank roads could be built for about a quar-ter of the cost of macadam roads, which were also just beginning to gain attention in Ontario. It was common to plank only one side of a 16-foot-wide (4.9 m), two-lane roadway to carry trac in both directions, with the dirt side being used only in the case of opposing trac where one trav-eller had to yield the right of way. Plank roads remained in vogue for about 20 years, when they were abandoned almost as quickly as they had burst onto the road building scene.Plenty of Pavement ChoicesToday the options for building a road are basically a choice between hot mix asphalt or concrete, but in the nineteenth century while the science was in its infancy there were as many dierent options as there were opinions on how to make a good road. e Godson Contracting Company Ltd. was a leading road builder in the Toronto area in the late 1800s and well into the next century, and the company was at the forefront of many of the new technologies that presented themselves at the time. History is indebted to the company’s founder, W.A. Godson, for a series of 26 articles he wrote in 1925 and placed as advertisements in e Canadian Engineer magazine that year. Detail section of a plank road.

ROADS AND ROAD BUILDING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY39they might like to form a Canadian partnership to bid on the work. Along with W.A. Godson, road builders John Taylor, Arthur Ardagh, and Arthur Leonard jumped at the opportunity, and in 1890 the Constructing and Paving Company Limited became the rst Canadian asphalt paving contractors.e new company proceeded to win most of the ensuing asphalt pavement contracts, usually a two-inch asphalt top spread directly over a stone or concrete base. e company enjoyed a cap-tive market for only a few years before another contractor, Frederick Coleman, bought a plant and won a few contracts. en the Barber Asphalt Paving Co., which had taken over the Warren-Scharf business, enlarged its Toronto plant. Local contractors in the 1890s had to buy their asphalt from Barber Asphalt, which controlled the supply and price closely, so for a few years the city engineers specied the use of tar instead.e earliest hot mix asphalt “plants” were shallow iron trays heated over open coal res. e aggregates were dried on the tray and then the hot natural asphalt was poured on top and the mix was stirred by hand. e quality of the mix was directly proportionate to the skill and experience of the operator. A mechanical mixer was introduced in Paris in 1854, but it didn’t take the world by An Ontario map published in 1895, when the population of Ontario was just over 2.1 million.