How the Welland Canal lets ships climb around Niagara Falls
Lake Erie sits 99.5 metres above Lake Ontario, and the only natural link between them plunges over Niagara Falls. Since November 30, 1829, the Welland Canal has carried ships up and down that step instead, and today about 3,000 vessels a year make the roughly eleven-hour trip through its eight locks.
Before the canal, cargo moving between the lakes was hauled overland on a portage road from Queenston, below the falls, to Chippawa, above them. In 1824 Upper Canada incorporated a canal company after nine Niagara landowners petitioned for it. One of them, William Hamilton Merritt, partly wanted steady water for his mills along Twelve Mile Creek in Thorold. When the first canal opened for a trial run five years later, he rode on the deck of the schooner Anne & Jane as it passed upbound to Buffalo. The plan to tunnel one section collapsed in sandy soil, so crews dug a deep open cut instead.
That first route, built with 40 wooden locks, stretched 44 km once an extension to the new town of Port Colborne opened in 1833. The wood soon rotted and ships kept growing. After financial panic in 1837 the colonial government bought out the private company, completing the takeover in 1841, and a second canal with 27 stone locks followed. A third, finished in the 1870s, cut a straighter line up the Niagara Escarpment with 26 locks. Work on the fourth began in 1913, paused from 1916 to 1919 for lack of wartime labour, and opened on August 6, 1932.
The modern canal runs from Port Weller on Lake Ontario to Port Colborne on Lake Erie. Seven lift locks, each 233.5 metres long and 24.4 metres wide, raise or lower ships by 13 to 15 metres apiece, while an eighth guard lock at the Erie end adjusts for changing lake levels. Vessels can be at most 225.5 metres long, and a high road bridge limits masts to 35.5 metres. A 13.4 km bypass around downtown Welland opened for the 1973 season.
The waterway moves around 40 million tonnes of cargo each year. By linking ports such as Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland to Montreal and Quebec City for ocean shipping, it outcompeted the narrower Erie Canal and helped Toronto grow.
Source: Welland Canal
