St Peters Canal Today
St Peters Canal 1946
The village of St. Peters was founded early in the 1800s. Local residents rehabilitated Denys’s old “haul over road”, laying wood skids for portaging small sailing ships across the isthmus. The route through Bras d’Or Lake was considered a much shorter and safer voyage to Sydney than traveling around the exposed southern coast of Cape Breton Island. In 1825 a feasibility study into building a canal was undertaken. Construction of the St. Peters Canal began in 1854 and took 15 years of digging, blasting and drilling through a solid granite hill 20 m (65 ft high to build a channel 800 m (2,600 ft long with an average width of 30 m (100 ft). The canal opened in 1869 at the dawn of the industrial age on Cape Breton Island. There can be a tidal difference of up to 1.4 m (4.5 ft) thus a lock was designed to regulate water levels.
The walls of the canal were lined with timber planking and locks were installed at each end. Modifications to the canal and lock continued until 1917 and the canal saw moderate to heavy use by small coastal steamships and barges, particularly during the First and Second World Wars when coal from the Sydney Coal Field was transported on this sheltered inland route to avoid U boats. A marble quarry on the western shore of Bras d’Or Lake at Marble Mountain also generated some shipping traffic.
The canal was designated a National Historic Site in 1929 and the federal government took over its operation. Parks Canada is the government agency responsible for its maintenance and operation and undertook a major project to restore both entrances to the canal in 1985. During the postwar, commercial shipping has largely avoided traveling through Bras d’Or Lake and the canal is almost exclusively used by pleasure boats, particularly sail boats with the increased popularity of cruising Bras d’Or Lake in recent decades.
Link to Article For Further Info:
http://www.visitstpeters.com/Main/history.htm
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