The Lost Villages of Ontario: Ten Towns Erased by the Seaway

Summary

The Lost Villages were ten communities along the St. Lawrence River in eastern Ontario — Aultsville, Dickinson's Landing, Farran's Point, Maple Grove, Mille Roches, Moulinette, Santa Cruz, Sheek's Island, Wales and Woodlands — that were permanently submerged on 1 July 1958 to make way for the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Moses-Saunders power dam. Roughly 6,500 people were displaced in the event remembered locally as Inundation Day, when a controlled blast on a cofferdam let the river flood the valley over the following days.

The villages occupied land first settled by United Empire Loyalists from 1784, and many families had farmed the riverbank for generations. They were strung along the old King's Highway No. 2 and the railway corridor, with farms, mills, cheese factories, churches, schools and stations forming a settled, century-and-a-half-old landscape. The joint Canada–United States project required raising the river to form Lake St. Lawrence, which meant flooding some 20,000 acres of inhabited shoreline between Iroquois and Cornwall.

The relocation was handled with bureaucratic thoroughness by the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario (Ontario Hydro). Between 1955 and 1957, some 500 buildings — whole houses among them — were lifted onto giant movers and transported intact to two newly built towns, Ingleside and Long Sault, while structures too large or fragile to move were demolished or burned. Cemeteries were exhumed and their dead and headstones reinterred before the water came.

Today the old roadbeds, sidewalks and foundations lie beneath Lake St. Lawrence and are visited by divers, while Aultsville's railway station and other rescued buildings survive on land. The Lost Villages Museum at Ault Park near Long Sault, run by the Lost Villages Historical Society, preserves relocated buildings and archives, and nearby Upper Canada Village incorporates heritage structures saved from the flood — keeping alive the memory of communities erased in a single planned day.

Timeline

Before the Flood

The land along this stretch of the St. Lawrence was settled from 1784 by United Empire Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution — many of them disbanded soldiers of the King's Royal Regiment of New York who received land grants from the Crown on the river's north bank. Over the next century and a half their descendants built up ten riverside villages — Aultsville, Dickinson's Landing, Farran's Point, Maple Grove, Mille Roches, Moulinette, Santa Cruz, Sheek's Island, Wales and Woodlands — many of whose families had lived in the same place for generations. Aultsville, the largest of the doomed villages, was named for Samuel Ault, a member of Canada's first parliament in 1867.

These were working communities, not hamlets. They were laid out along the old King's Highway No. 2 and served by the railway, with mills, factories, stores, churches, schools and railway stations; Aultsville had its own station on the line. The whole district that the project would affect was substantial — some 225 farms, 531 homes, 17 churches and 18 cemeteries fell within the path of the rising water. The river was both livelihood and identity, a constant presence that shaped two centuries of local life.

It was a deeply rooted landscape, the kind where graveyards held founders' families and buildings carried generations of memory. That depth of attachment is what made the wholesale, administered erasure of the villages so wrenching, even when it was carried out with compensation and careful planning.

The Flooding

The St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project was a binational undertaking by Canada and the United States, combining a deep-water navigation channel with massive hydroelectric generation. Construction of the Moses-Saunders power dam began in August 1954; its two halves — the Robert H. Saunders station for Ontario Hydro and the companion plant for the New York Power Authority — required raising the river to form the new reservoir, Lake St. Lawrence. Forming that pool meant flooding roughly 20,000 acres of settled Canadian shoreline.

Ontario Hydro managed the human relocation as a vast logistical operation. Between 1955 and 1957 around 530 buildings — whole houses among them — were jacked up onto giant movers and carried to two purpose-built towns, Ingleside and Long Sault, in a house-moving effort that became emblematic of the whole project; buildings that could not be moved were demolished or burned. The dead were not left behind either — affecting 18 cemeteries, the project saw Ontario Hydro re-inter more than 2,000 bodies, but only where next of kin requested it, with headstones gathered into a pioneer memorial.

The end came on 1 July 1958, Inundation Day. At about 8 a.m. a cofferdam was breached by a controlled explosion, and over the following four days the rising waters of Lake St. Lawrence covered the ten village sites. Two centuries of riverbank settlement disappeared in a planned operation measured in hours and days.

Contributing Factors

What Surfaces

Beneath Lake St. Lawrence the old townscape survives as a sunken grid: roadbeds, sidewalks, building foundations and the platform area of Aultsville's site lie on the lakebed, and the clear, navigable water makes the drowned villages a destination for recreational divers exploring the streets where communities once stood.

A great deal was also saved on land. Aultsville's railway station was preserved, and many of the buildings lifted out ahead of the flood were re-erected rather than lost. Upper Canada Village near Morrisburg, a living-history museum, incorporates heritage structures rescued from the project, while relocated cemeteries and a pioneer memorial keep the villages' dead in consecrated ground.

The central place of remembrance is the Lost Villages Museum at Ault Park, on the Long Sault Parkway near Long Sault, operated by the Lost Villages Historical Society. There a cluster of relocated buildings and an archive of photographs and records preserve the story of the ten communities, ensuring that the towns erased on Inundation Day remain part of the region's identity rather than a forgotten footnote to the Seaway.

Lessons

References

• Lost Villages Wikipedia
• The Lost Villages Lost Villages Historical Society
• Lost Villages of the St. Lawrence Ontario Heritage Trust