The following is a re-print of a past column by former Advertiser columnist Stephen Thorning, who passed away on Feb. 23, 2015.
Some text has been updated to reflect changes since the original publication and any images used may not be the same as those that accompanied the original publication.
Disputes between Fergus council and the Wellington County council are a continuing theme of our local history. They began soon after the Fergus municipal government was established in 1858, and persisted until the eve of amalgamation in 1998.
Invariably the disputes concerned money. Fergus always believed that it gave far more money to the county than it received in benefits, and that other municipal governments received better treatment at its expense.
One of those disputes began in 1878, and it concerned the jurisdiction of the St. David Street bridge. Highway 6 now uses that route over the Grand River, but a century and a quarter ago things were not so clear. Then as now, bridges were costly projects. Local councils frequently argued that the bridges they put up were also used by people outside their municipalities, and therefore they should not be required to meet the full cost.
In some cases, there were no arguments. Bridges on county roads were clearly the responsibility of the county, and from an early date Wellington County had a committee to deal with bridges that were on boundary roads between municipalities. Over the years county council had muddied the waters by offering grants for replacement or repair of local bridges. Each of those cases was later cited as a precedent by another municipality seeking similar treatment. Legally, the situation became more and more clouded in the 1870s. The provincial Municipal Act contained regulations that were unclear, and the provincial Mowat government revised the Municipal Act several times through the 1870s.
In Fergus, part of the problem came with the county’s takeover, in the 1850s, of the old privately owned road companies that originally built the Highway 6 route of today. Officially, that road consisted of two portions, chartered at different times. The first (the Fergus & Guelph Road Co.) was for the route from Marden to the south end of the Tower Street bridge. The other portion (the Fergus & Arthur Road Co.) began at the northern boundary of Fergus. The portion between the two, including the business portion of St. Andrew St. and the Tower St. bridge, had never been designated a county road. A county bylaw from the 1850s designated the route over the Tower St. bridge, along St. Andrew St., and turning north at St. David, as the connecting route, but the county did not assume that stretch for maintenance purposes.
Nevertheless, Wellington County gave Fergus a grant when the Tower Street bridge was replaced. A precedent had been made in 1874 in Elora, when Wellington County granted a $400 contribution for the replacement of Elora’s Irvine bridge, which was neither on a county road nor a boundary bridge.
In February of 1878 contractor John Moffat inspected the other downtown Fergus bridge, at St. David St., and reported that the side stringers were rotted and unsafe, but those in the centre were in much better condition. Council responded by erecting railings on the sides to restrict traffic to the centre part of the span.
That was only a stop-gap measure. When county council refused to grant any money for the replacement, Fergus council launched a lawsuit against the county. Wellington County argued that it recently had contributed to the cost of the Tower Street bridge, and would not help pay for another one such a short distance away. Fergus argued that the St. David St. bridge, was now part of the main route, and effectively part of the county road.
The case was heard at the Assizes in Guelph, and then referred to the Chancery Court in Toronto. There the matter sat for months. A case from Haldimand County, similar to the Fergus one, had already been through the system, and was awaiting a ruling from the provincial Court of Appeal. In that case, Haldimand had refused to pay for a bridge across the Grand River desired by a local municipality. The final ruling came at the end of June 1878. After losing in the lower courts, the appeal judges ruled in favour of Haldimand, stating that it is “discretionary for a county to erect a bridge.”
That ruling deflated optimism in Fergus, but the council decided it would stick to its guns. That fall, Fergus reeve Matthew Anderson consulted with Robert Harrison, Chief Justice of Ontario, who gave the opinion that in the Fergus case, the county should be obligated to pay for the St. David St. bridge.
As the case dragged on into 1879, the only progress was ever larger legal bills for both sides. At the first meeting of the 1879 Fergus councillor Adam Argo suggested that it would be best to apply to the county for a grant, and to defer the legal case in the meantime, to be resurrected should the county refuse a grant.
Other councillors were more confident of the strength of the Fergus case in the lawsuit, and wanted to proceed with it without applying for a grant. Reeve Anderson wanted to know the current status of the case. Councillor Cattanach was authorized to go to Toronto to consult with the Fergus solicitor. Councillor J.W. Green-Armytage thought that the bridge should be closed if it was so dangerous. He also wanted to proceed with rebuilding, and recover all or part of the cost later from the county.
It was difficult for council to agree to a course of action, but in the end they decided not to apply to the county for a grant, to proceed with the legal case, and to have John Moffat inspect the bridge again. Moffat’s inspection revealed what everyone already knew. The bridge had deteriorated further since the previous inspection.
Later that spring the ruling came: Fergus lost the case. There was much hard feeling. Fergus council believed that the judge had not understood some important facts. That belief did have some merit. The judge had assumed, based on the grant of four years earlier, that the county was maintaining the Tower Street bridge. That grant had been only a one-time contribution to a rebuilding project. Council, with hat in hand, then applied for a county grant for the St. David St. bridge.
The matter came to a head in June 1879. On market day that month, several head of cattle broke through the St. David St. bridge on their way to the market grounds. Council then closed the bridge to all but pedestrian traffic. That same week, serious rotting was spotted on the deck of the Tower St. bridge, though it was only four years old. After an examination, council restricted teams and cattle to one side of the structure only, and erected caution signs. It was obvious to everyone that Fergus was very close to having no crossing of the Grand at all within its boundaries.
The solution was obvious: the county should take over one of the two Fergus bridges, as it had with the bridges in every other municipality that had a county road passing through it. In all the animosity and name calling over the previous two years, most of the men involved were more interested in settling scores than in dealing with the bridge issue. And amidst all the yelling, everyone seems to have forgotten a provision in the Municipal Act, admittedly vague and open to interpretation, that “connecting roads” over 100 feet in length should be assumed by the county.
Elora had referred to that provision in 1874, arguing successfully that the Irvine bridge was a connecting road between Elora and Pilkington. Using that argument, the case for the St. David St. bridge in Fergus was even stronger: it was over 100 feet in length, and it linked two sections of the most important road in the county.
(Next time: Sorting out the mess, and building a new bridge.)
*This column was originally published in the Advertiser on Sept. 6, 2013.
