Reflections from Crumbly Acres: lost villages

Lost Villages Museum

I'd not heard of this before.

We took a trip to Cardinal. Then kept on driving.

They put in the canal along the St. Laurence Seaway, and had to flood about 10 villages for the hydro dam.
The historical society has a terrific website.

The St. Lawrence Project

The photographs are amazing. Ghost Town Pix

Section 3 writes of the people living in these villages who created a living by serving those who passed through. Eventually, they built mills, harnessing the water in the Long Sault.

This ended when the seaway was installed, but people in the declining villages could see what was coming.
Change is always difficult. Each home owner had to negotiate the purchase of their house.

There are several buildings representing the past and the period of the time. Lots of artifacts, too. It's a delightful spot if you are passing through, with a place to picnic.

Lost Villages Museum

This map shows the flooded villages

is located in Ault Park on Fran Laflamme Drive, 3km east of Long Sault, Ontario. The museum site consists of ten heritage buildings, moved and restored to Ault Park from The Lost Villages and surrounding townships by the members of The Lost Villages Historical Society. Both the interiors and exteriors of the buildings have been restored, and they have been assembled in a village-like setting at Ault Park. The buildings commemorate the inundation of lands, to the south of the museum complex, on July 1, 1958.

Bridge to the US

They began negotiations with the US government, finished in 1932, but the Senate in the US did not ratify. They tried again in 1941, but didn't accomplish anything until after the war.
The Seaway project had two purposes. Primarily it was to provide Eastern Ontario and Upstate New York with much low-cost hydroelectric power. Secondly, replacing the antiquated 110 year-old Cornwall Canal, with a system that could handle the larger ocean-going shipping vessels, was needed to provide greater access to the inland ports on the Great Lakes.

This building was taken apart, and put back here.

It was a long, complicated process to make the seaway navigable. The first canals opened in 1783. The Cornwall Canal was begun in 1834 and went inland to Dickinson's Landing, taking boats up to 186' long. They finished it in 1842.
They made it up to Lake Superior, through shallow canals in the Welland Canal in 1900. Eventually this part of the project was finished in 1958.