Ketchum's Folly

T.D. Regehr is a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan
and the author of The Beauharnois Scandal: A Story of Entrepreneurship
and Politics.

Henry Ketchum’s folly was a proposed marine railway designed to carry
ocean-going ships of up to 1000 ton burthen across the 17-mile Chignecto
Isthmus. The railway, with appropriate docking facilities at Fort
Lawrence and at Tidnish (both in Nova Scotia near that province’s
border with New Brunswick), would allow ships to be carried by rail from
the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to the Bay of Fundy, thereby avoiding the
risks and additional distances associated with ocean voyages east of
Nova Scotia. More than $3 million of private and public money was spent
before the scheme was abandoned.

Whereas others have characterized the project as an entrepreneurial
failure, Jay Underwood seeks to demonstrate that the project was
technologically and financially sound, but that time and circumstances
combined to foil Ketchum’s dream. His assessment of the project’s
technological aspects is based almost entirely on material written by
Ketchum, while his discussion of the financing of the project is
incomplete and rather confusing. References to government subsidies and
guarantees, and to the par and market values of various bond and stock
issues, are given without a clear explanation of exactly what
proportions of the total amount spent were obtained from the various
sources. This poorly edited work includes numerous references to other
works and direct quotations—none of which are footnoted.