Rochester was first developed because the unusual north-flowing Genesee River created some waterfalls there useful to power mills. These were still several miles south of Lake Ontario, so only a tiny separate community rose there. One of the reasons that the Erie Canal was built to connect Lake Erie with the Hudson River and therefore New York was because there were no good water routes. Lake Ontario thereafter never needed to become a trade route for the U.S. Canada used it as a route to Britain but it was inferior to other modes of transportation. Toronto was smaller than Rochester for the entire 19th century.
The Erie Canal BUILT Rochester.
If you look at the population figures, it jumps once the canal went through. You had all that fertile farmland to grow wheat, and you had the Falls of the Genesee to provide power for mills, but until Clinton’s Big Ditch went in you didn’t have a fast and reliable way to get all the flour to market in New York City. Once you did, it really took off. Rochester became the Flour City, and its fortune was made, allowing other ventures to take root later on.
Yep, America’s first Boomtown.
I was thinking that the Erie Canal might have been the key factor. The canal opened up Lake Erie to water-borne trade with the east coast and the Atlantic. And because the canal was built in America, it would have favored the development of American cities along the Lake Erie coast which would have an advantage in that trade.
The problem with this theory is the Welland Canal, which also opened up Lake Erie to water-born trade with the east. It opened just four years after the Erie Canal and should have theoretically pushed the same kind of growth in Canada that the Erie Canal did in America.
Doesn’t everyone?
ISWYDT
For Discourse.
The Erie Canal connected Buffalo to New York, an outlet directly on the Atlantic Ocean and already the leading city in America. The Welland Canal connected Buffalo to Toronto. But then what?
Lake Ontario connects to basically nothing. The St. Lawrence River does eventually get to the Atlantic, but is hundreds of miles long and empties out in the far North Atlantic hundreds more miles from anything. It was also difficult to navigate and got worse every year as ships grew larger. Not until the St. Lawrence Seaway was completed in the 1950s could the largest ships get to Toronto. It took until the 1970s before Toronto’s metro population surpassed Montreal’s.
America has an amazing river system that runs nearly everywhere and has a million good harbors on the Atlantic and the Gulf Coast. Canada has the one, and it’s not good. That Canada has managed to become a major economy despite giant geographical handicaps is extremely impressive. Nothing in the 1800s would have predicted that. Is that an overgeneralization or simple reality?
Not really true, I’m afraid. I know because I’ve been researching this for a book recently. Even before the St. Lawrence Seaway was built in the 1950s there was a series of locks that enabled ships to get up the St. Lawrence River from the Atlantic into the Great Lakes. That’s how Admiral Byrd’s ship that went to the Antarctic got to the Chicago Century of Progress exhibition. Not to mention three submarines that got to Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, and several other ocean-going ships that came to the Greatr Lakes.
The St. Lawrence Seaway project standardized and widened the points of access, but the means of avoiding the rapids and the falls were already in place.
Not to mention that there were shipbuilding companies in the Great Lakes that constructed ships for the Navy that were used in WWII.
It did - in Toronto.
Toronto is on Lake Ontario not Lake Erie. Toronto had access to the Atlantic via Lake Ontario and the Saint Lawrence River. The Welland Canal, which connected Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, was not part of that route.
Toronto was never a port-heavy city compared to Montreal. Toronto’s growth overtaking Montreal was almost entirely due to Quebec’s separatists driving capital out of the province where it fled to Toronto.
It’s not just ports and trade. The Welland Canal boosted Canada’s steel industry, which is heavily located along the western end of lake Ontario around the Niagara Escarpment. 40% of Canada’s steel industry market share is based in Toronto.
Not many available hotel rooms, either. I once set out from Winnipeg for an expected two-day drive to Toronto and just figured I’d pull over for the night when I got tired. When I did, I found hotels few and far between and all of them full probably of like-minded folk who tired sooner. I ended up having to drive through the night and take a room in Sault Ste. Marie to rest during the day.
Canada has a limited population in a big area. Most of this population lives in cities. Building cities on lakes makes sense because it is useful to have ports. But Canada has many lakes and few large cities. The cities that developed into important ports, then bigger cities, tended to be closer to the St. Lawrence, largely for historical reasons. So the reason? Better options.
I feel that explains why people live in Toronto or Montreal rather than Lake Erie City. But I don’t feel it really explains why people live in Thunder Bay or Winnipeg or Saskatoon rather than Lake Erie City.
But does it have to? Any land many people think is worth occupying is going to have a city nearby given enough people. I’ll give you the weather, but chacun á son gout.
I feel this is a rephrasing of my question. If any land many people think worth occupying is going to have a city and Canada’s Lake Erie shoreline doesn’t have a city, then it follows that many people didn’t think it was worth occupying. Which leads to my original question; why did people think that?
No, I think it was worth occupying. Just not by a lot of people lumped into a city.
It’s fine farmland. Tomatoes, that were used by Heinz in Leamington for ketchup, but also tobacco—for years, some of the world’s finest sweet virginia tobacco was grown in that peninsula (which is why Canadian cigarettes tended to be straight sweet virginia tobacco, unlike American cigarette brands, which tended to be blends of tobaccos). That market has dried up a bit, but the farmland remains. And wine grapes too, as the wines produced around Point Pelee have proven. As long as farmers could get their products to market through London, Woodstock, Kitchener, etc., there was no need for a city on Lake Erie’s shore.
The land is worth occupying, but by agricultural interests, not people.