Editor’s note: The following article was originally published on Linda Seccaspina’s website and is being shared here in its original, unedited form. A link to the original article can be found at the end of this story.
There are places that seem to have been designed by a committee. Then there is Delta, Ontario, where nature appears to have chaired the meeting and the local residents have been trying to negotiate with it ever since. Long before there was a village, a mill, a hotel, a main street or anyone worrying about whether their boots were waterproof, there was ice. About 18,000 years ago, the last Ice Age had Delta under nearly two kilometres of glacial ice. The weight was so enormous that the land itself was pushed downward by roughly 175 metres. It was an impressive way for the neighbourhood to begin, although real estate agents would probably have struggled with the listing: “Beautiful waterfront property, currently buried under 1.2 miles of ice.”
As the glaciers retreated, the land slowly rose, the climate warmed and humans eventually arrived. By about 10,000 years ago, people were travelling through this landscape, hunting caribou and fishing the abundant waters. Over succeeding millennia, the menu changed from caribou to moose to white-tailed deer, while the lakes continued to provide fish. Lower Beverley Lake was once known as White Fish Lake, which seems a perfectly sensible name for a place where the fish were apparently making a strong case for themselves. But the real story of Delta is water—and humanity’s remarkable confidence that it could improve upon it.
For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples used the lakes and waterways as a natural transportation network. Archaeological evidence points to hunting and fishing camps used by Point Peninsula peoples more than 2,000 years ago, while evidence from nearby Lower Rideau Lake suggests that water travel in the region reaches back perhaps 9,000 years. The waterways were highways long before anyone had invented a road, a bridge, a traffic light or someone yelling that you were blocking the intersection. Then came the settlers.
In the early nineteenth century, water was not merely scenery–it was power. In 1810, William Jones began constructing a remarkable three-and-a-half-storey Georgian stone mill based on the automated milling ideas of American inventor Oliver Evans. The mill was built on bedrock, and a new channel was excavated from Upper Beverley Lake to bring water to it. There was just one small complication. The original stream channel was filled in and somehow was a wonderfully optimistic piece of engineering. The natural watercourse was essentially told, “Thank you for your service; we have made other arrangements.”
The new mill, its dam and the altered water channels transformed the landscape. What had once been two bodies of water became one much larger Upper Beverley Lake, with the mill itself helping regulate the water. The level was raised substantially, and Delta grew around this industrial landscape. For a while, everyone presumably congratulated themselves.Then spring arrived, and water, unlike municipal paperwork, does not always respect the boundaries humans draw for it.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the earthen berms holding back Upper Beverley Lake were beginning to erode. Every spring, snow melted, water rose and the freshet began its annual conversation with Delta. Unfortunately, the conversation was frequently held in the middle of the street. The old natural stream channel, conveniently filled in decades earlier, had not forgotten where it was. When the water escaped, it could follow those old routes straight through the village. Delta’s residents learned that you can bury a creek, but you cannot necessarily convince the creek that it has retired. Photographs, like Sues’ from around 1900 show the village during periods of high water, with buildings such as Flood’s Hotel standing near the Old Stone Mill. Horses and vehicles sometimes had to negotiate substantial amounts of water. Delta was developing a reputation for picturesque waterfront living, although the definition of “waterfront” occasionally expanded considerably.
Then came April 1912, and the spring freshet rose dramatically, and water covered the main thoroughfare to a depth of roughly two feet for several days. Two feet may not sound like much until you imagine trying to run a business, deliver the mail, get groceries or simply cross the street while the street has become an inland sea. Delta had effectively become a small Canadian Venice, except without gondolas and with considerably more mud. The flooding continued to be a recurring headache for decades. Berms eroded, water found old pathways and residents discovered once again that gravity remains undefeated.
The newspaper clipping accompanying this story tells of a delegation of 50 residents from the townships of Rear of Leeds and Lansdowne, Bastard, Burgess and South Crosby travelling to Ottawa to meet the Minister of Railways and Canals. Their proposal was wonderfully ambitious: build a lock at Morton, where a large dam already existed, and dredge the stream for two and a half miles toward Lower Beverley Lake. The argument was irresistible. Connect Delta and Lyndhurst more directly with the Rideau River and lakes, and summer tourists—especially owners of boats—would supposedly flock in. Because apparently the answer to a community already having a complicated relationship with water was: bring in more boats. Still, the idea made economic sense. Better navigation meant easier access, tourism and commerce. A village surrounded by lakes naturally wanted to take advantage of them.
Delta’s water story took another major turn in the 1960s. In 1961, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources took over control of the water levels from the Old Stone Mill. The following year, MNR constructed a new stoplog dam upstream from the King Street Bridge to regulate Upper Beverley Lake. The old stone bridge, built in the late nineteenth century, had its own date with progress. In 1963 it was demolished and replaced with the concrete bridge seen today. Another piece of Delta’s past disappeared, replaced by something that presumably required considerably less stone and considerably more confidence in concrete. But the greatest irony may be that the flooding problems were partly created by earlier attempts to control the water in the first place. The mill changed the natural landscape, the old channel was filled, water levels were altered. Berms eventually weakened, and when spring arrived, the water remembered the way home.
Delta’s story is therefore not simply a story about floods. It is a story about people trying to make a living from water, trying to harness it, redirect it, navigate it and occasionally persuade it to behave. The Old Stone Mill brought industry, the lakes brought transportation, the proposed canal improvements promised tourists, and the floods brought wet feet.
SOURCE: Linda Seccaspina – Total Delta – The Hotel and Beverley Lake.
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