Photo: Gogerr, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Welland Canal: Niagara's Working Waterway
August 27, 2026 · I'm In Here ·
Niagara Falls is a spectacular reason the Niagara River can't be used as a shipping route between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, and that's been a real problem for as long as there's been serious commercial traffic on the Great Lakes. The Welland Canal is the solution: an artificial waterway that lets ships climb around the falls and the escarpment beneath them, connecting the two lakes where nature never intended a channel to exist.
The idea belongs mostly to William Hamilton Merritt, a St. Catharines businessman who spent the 1820s pushing for a canal to power his mills and, more ambitiously, to open a shipping route past the falls entirely. The first Welland Canal opened in 1829 — a shallow, hand-dug channel threaded with small wooden locks, built largely by immigrant labourers with picks and horse-drawn carts. It was primitive by modern standards, but it proved the concept and reshaped the region's economy almost immediately by giving Niagara a direct role in Great Lakes trade instead of a detour around it.
That first canal has since been rebuilt from scratch three more times, each version taking a different path across the peninsula in search of a more direct route and deeper water. The current canal — the fourth — opened in 1932 as the Welland Ship Canal, running roughly 43 kilometres from Port Weller on Lake Ontario to Port Colborne on Lake Erie through eight locks, each lifting or lowering ships to manage the same elevation change that produces the falls a few kilometres east.
The route changed again in the 1970s, when a bypass channel was cut to send ship traffic around the city of Welland instead of through its downtown. The 13-kilometre bypass, finished in 1973, moved large vessels out of a busy urban core; the old channel through Welland was handed to the city rather than filled in, and after considerable cleanup it became the Welland Recreational Waterway — docks, rowing clubs and small boats where freighters once passed.
The earlier canals haven't fully disappeared, either. Old lock chambers, canal-side parks and a scattering of street and neighbourhood names across Thorold, Merritton and Welland trace routes that came before the current one, for anyone who knows where to look. The canal rarely gets top billing next to the falls it was built to get around, but it's been quietly reshaping how this region moves, works and grows for close to two hundred years — and it's still doing all three today, one ship at a time.