Bill Roberts photo
Newmarket canal locks at Rogers Reservoir along Tom Taylor Trail.
Newmarket
July 01, 2008 12:26 AM
By: Amanda Persico, Staff Writer
Newmarket residents are always looking for cheaper transportation. The town has even initiated transportation programs, such as Smart Commute and public transit initiatives, by bus or by train.
But in 1904, rising gas prices weren’t what fueled the need for cheaper transportation.
Residents, farmers and manufacturers gathered at town hall to discuss freight train price increases, which many could not afford.
It was a battle between the Grand Trunk Railway and the Holland River, between the federal and municipal governments, which ultimately became a battle between the Liberals and the Conservatives.
The little town of Newmarket got caught in the crossfire between Wilfrid Laurier’s outgoing Liberals and Robert Borden’s incoming Conservatives.
And the war wounds remain visible to all those who venture down into Rogers Reservoir and walk along what looks like an empty river.
On Sept. 10, 1904, town council unanimously passed a motion to build a canal connecting York County to Lake Simcoe and the Trent Valley Canal System.
Six months later, Sir WIlliam Mulock, the Liberal MP and Minister of Labour and Public Works at the time, led a 65-man delegation pulled by horses to Ottawa.
The team presented the canal system idea as a way to encourage new industry and push for lower freight rates.
“This was an image of what Newmarket could have been,” said Ralph Magel, past president of the Newmarket Historical Society and former history teacher. “It could have been a seaport.”
Engineers at the turn of the century, explained that for the canal to work, the community would have to drain Bond Lake and Lake Wilcox because of low water supply in Newmarket.
When Robert Borden’s Conservative government came into power in 1911, hydraulic engineers examined the canal system and said it would have taken two weeks to fill.
“It was outstanding because it was outrageous and it was such a monstrous undertaking,” said the late George Luesby in 1984.
“The fellows who surveyed the thing must have been blind.”
The cancelation of Newmarket’s canal, after it was 85 per cent complete, remains a mystery and a source of contention for some local historians.
Was it political bribery to keep a long-standing Liberal riding happy? Or was it an engineering folly?
“Some say it was a money grab by Newmarket,” Mr. Magel said. “It would have changed the shape of downtown. It was a dream for the future.”
But the dream and image of a seaport sits empty and buried.
The story of Newmarket’s ghost canal is another government project gone awry. But unlike other government scandals, the almost complete canal remains permanently stuck in Newmarket’s scenery.
Just north of Davis Drive, near the Rogers Reservoir, embedded in wild flowers and weeds, remains cement walls of what should have been Newmarket’s waterway.