Looking for Seaway testimonials
The St. Lawrence Seaway officially turns 50 in a couple weeks. The agencies that runs it, and the communities that host it - are planning myriad festivities on both sides of the border. Check out this site and this one for details.
The Seaway is in the eye of the beholder. It's brought us Alcoa, Reynolds, and General Motors (jobs), the zebra mussel (invasive species), PCBs (from aforementioned factories), Lost Villages (flooded behind the dam), the Moses-Saunders power dam (cheap electricity), oil spills (the Slick of '76), and the always fascinating sight of huge freighters slipping through the American narrows. I'm sure there's lots more.
I'm interested in talking with people who have first-hand accounts of the birth of this engineering marvel that forever changed the North Country. Did you or a family member work on its construction? Was your home relocated? Did you house or serve food to the workers? Did you go watch the construction on the weekends?
Send me an e-mail at david-at-ncpr-dot-org. Thanks!
Labels: stlv
posted by David Sommerstein @ 6/22/2009 02:25:00 PM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
My family migrated to the North Country during the Seaway boom. My father worked for Remington Rand and staffed a new office in Potsdam that sold business machines to the new Seaway companies--mostly mechanical adding machines and electric typewriters. Some of my earliest memories are of excursions to the Massena area to watch Gaines and Sherman trucks relocate houses out of what would become Lake St. Lawrence. After the lake was filled, our usual family outing was powerboating up and down the new waterway in a wooden-hulled cruiser dragged along by quirky and unreliable twin outboards. The boom died out by 1960--my father liked the area, and took a teaching job in order to raise his family in the North Country.
I remember my father took us to see the construction one weekend and driving through the road that is now the tunnel under Eisenhower lock but there was no tunnel yet, just road. As we went through the hollow I looked down through the looming walls that became the lock. I did not have a camera. I wish I had.
Post a Comment
<< Home