Mr. Merritt's Ditch: A Welland Canals Album

Description

152 pages
Contains Photos, Illustrations, Maps, Bibliography, Index
$19.95
ISBN 1-55046-005-6
DDC 386'.47'0971338

Year

1992

Contributor

Reviewed by Steve Pitt

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Review

This picture book is billed by the authors as a companion volume to an
earlier work, The Welland Canals: The Growth of Mr. Merritt’s Ditch.
It consists of materials that did not make it into the first book, and
its stated theme is to portray an imaginary “scrapbook or album
assembled over the 40 year career of a Welland Canal engineer with a
strong interest in the early canals, who worked on the building of the
present Ship Canal . . . and saw the construction of the Welland
By-Pass.”

This format, copied from several actual scrapbooks Styran and Taylor
discovered in the course of their research, might have made a wonderful
volume. Unfortunately, the authors allowed themselves to be limited by
the medium of a picture book. The photographs and maps, when compared to
those in the original volume, generally come off as second best. The
newspaper clippings are equally unremarkable; most are advertisements
for businesses that were typical of their kind anywhere in the province.


Although the authors, in their introduction, voice frustration at the
limited materials available on the subject of early canal construction,
there are sources they either missed or ignored: newspaper articles,
military proclamations, personal letters, and church archives, for
example, could have supplied a depth that is absent here.

Perusing this book is like looking at someone else’s family pictures:
despite lengthy captions, the illustrations remain strangely remote. The
original book is well worth a read by anyone with a passing interest in
the topic; this companion volume is strictly for the obsessed.

Citation

Styran, Roberta M., “Mr. Merritt's Ditch: A Welland Canals Album,” Canadian Book Review Annual Online, accessed November 9, 2024, https://cbra.library.utoronto.ca/items/show/12566.