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November 30th, 1824 is an important day in the history of Niagara. A handful of businessmen who had less than a year before formed the Welland Canal Company met at Allanburg to shovel and turn over the first sod, marking the beginning of construction of one of the most important infrastructure projects in Canadian history.
As those events usually go, speeches were delivered amongst the small group on that cold day. William Hamilton Merritt’s speech has been shared and reshared many times over the years as it reveals not only the hard work the Company was about to endure, but also the vision of the project itself. This vision: a great canal linking the Great Lakes and facilitating trade and settlement, and linking the world to the interior of North America was a practical reality only realized with the third and fourth Welland Canals. But they hard to start somewhere, and so Merritt called on his fellow Niagarans to join the cause and celebrate this new beginning.
Today’s episode of Museum Chat Live! brings a reading of an excerpt of Merritt’s speech from 200 years ago to our ears. Edited and read by museum volunteer Des Corran, you can hear the optimism with which Merritt would cling to over some very challenging years of construction ahead.
Enjoy the episode.
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