Dunnville
Description of the town created by a feeder canal
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The first settler in the Dunnville area was probably Salmon Minor. Born in 1781 in Minortown, the family settlement near Woodbury Connecticut, Minor obtained a tract of land and settled here in 1825 with his wife and two children. He built his home on what became Lock Street, probably a log cabin that he later replaced with a frame house. The frame house is still standing although not in the same place. About the same time, Hamilton Merritt was trying to find a solution to a problem with the Welland Canal. Between what is today Allanburg and Port Robinson, his engineers had found that the deeper they dug, the more the sides of the canal caved in. That meant that the original plan to use the water from the Welland River to supply the canal had to be abandoned because the floor of the canal would be higher than the river. The only solution would be to find the water from some other, higher, source. It could not be Lake Erie, because the lake was lower than the canal. The source had to be the Grand River. After a number of ideas were tried, the engineers decided that a canal feeder would have to be dug from the Grand to Port Robinson, but the river would have to be dammed to raise the level of the river to the desired height. The first idea was to dig the feeder directly to the mouth of the Grand but that idea was killed by Commodore Barrie, the commander of the British naval forces on the Great Lakes and the person after whom the town of Barrie is named. The Navy had a station at the mouth of the Grand and had plans to build a bigger station further upriver. Finally, Lieutenant-Governor Maitland compromised; the feeder would be directed five miles up the Grand to a spot that eventually became Dunnville. A dam was built across the Grand River and the feeder was turned at right-angles at Broad Creek, now Stromness, and directed just north of the dam. A small community started to grow around the junction of the feeder and the river. It was named Dunnville after John Henry Dunn, the Receiver-General of Upper Canada and a friend and confidant of Merritt. At first the feeder was intended to be just that, a canal that supplied water to the Welland Canal. But soon Merritt would change his mind after Absalom Shade and other merchants on the Grand told him how badly they needed to find a way to get their goods to Lake Ontario and markets there. Soon the canal feeder became the Feeder Canal when it was widened and deepened to take small vessels from the Grand to the Welland Canal. Dunnville became a port as goods shipped down the Grand River were transhipped at a wharf north of the dam to smaller vessels for the feeder canal. Another wharf south of the dam allowed ships from Lake Erie to put in so that their goods could be transhipped along the feeder canal. An extension of the feeder canal was eventually built from Stromness to Port Maitland so that ships from the Grand River could use the feeder canal to sail to the mouth of the river and thence to the lake. The heyday of the Feeder Canal was not to last very long. It lasted until the Second Welland Canal was built and Lake Erie could at last supply the water for the Welland Canal. Then the feeder just began to fall apart. The feeder canal is mostly still there. It runs from south of Welland in a straight line to Stromness just east of the eastern half of Port Maitland. The section from Stromness to Dunnville is also still there as far as the outskirts of Dunnville. In 1848, the Town of Dunnville bought the section within the town limits for $1 and gradually drained and filled it in. It ran between today's Queen and Main Streets and there is no sign of it any more. Places to see in Dunnville:
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