Over the years this column has consider pioneering conservation work of amateur environmentalists such as Bob Kerr and Hugh Templin, of Fergus, and John Connon and Kay Marston, of Elora. They brought conservation issues, particularly those pertaining to the Grand River, to public attention, and were relentless in pursuit of those issue.
As important as any of them was William H. Breithaupt, of Kitchener. Scion of the famous leather-making family, Breithaupt, who was born in 1857, trained as an engineer. The Grand River was his consuming interest most of his life. He proposed several schemes to control flooding and to generate power on the river.
It was easy for political figures to dismiss ideas of people like Kerr – who were amateurs and idealists. Breithaupt was a practical engineer, and it was not so easy to brush his proposals aside. In May of 1924, he read a paper on potential for power generation on the Grand at the annual meeting of the professional engineers’ association in Hamilton.
Breithaupt was then 67. In preparing his paper he drew on decades of his studies and surveys. Unlike many engineers, he took a keen interest in history, especially in the way historical development pertained to the problem at hand.
His paper began by describing the Grand watershed, which he stated was over 1,000 square miles. He said the watershed in its upper reaches was over 1,400 feet above sea level. He estimated swamp and wetlands once covered 700 square miles of it, and particularly in its upper reaches, in what became East and West Luther and nearby townships, where swamp was about 400 square miles.
He said, “A policy of intelligent government conservation 50 years ago [the 1870s] would have retained these swamps as public domain, providing a continuing supply of cedar, tamarack, and other poles and timber, a bird and game sanctuary, and a perennial source of stream flow benefitting the entire peninsula” [of southern Ontario].
“Instead of that, the drainage was aided by government funds. The territory is now a flat plain largely of grazing lands, with few if any farms of much value, and this great natural resource is destroyed.”
The swamp, he said, had been rapidly settled after 1870, and the land largely cleared and drained between 1875 and 1895. Since then, the Grand had been subject to severe floods, often, but not always, in the spring. Extreme floods normally lasted three or four hours. He noted the highest levels ever recorded occurred at Fergus on April 7, 1913. Water volumes, as measured at Elora, could reach 13,000 cubic feet per second.
To control that water, he proposed two large dams be constructed, one on the Conestoga, and the other on the Grand River below Elora in Pilkington. They should be about 70 feet high, he said, and would produce reservoirs about five square miles in area and containing about three billion gallons each. He did not propose any dam above Elora to help restore the Luther wetlands. The two dams, he said, would provide a steady flow in the river so industries of Preston and Galt could utilize the power potential.
The most intriguing part of his proposal was to dig a diversion channel and build a pipeline from the Grand, beginning about three miles below Galt, and ending at Dundas. That would create a potential drop of some 600 feet, much higher than at Niagara Falls. Allowing for a minimum but adequate volume of water to remain in the lower Grand, he calculated power potential at 24,000 horsepower at the Dundas generating station.
The idea was similar to the Chippawa Canal at Niagara, where water was taken far above the falls and channeled to the generating stations below to increase the drop and thus the power potential.
Breithaupt estimated the cost of the work at $1.5-million, and the conduit and generating station at $2-million. Taking into account the capital and operating costs, the power generated would cost about $125 per horsepower, fully competitive with the Niagara generating stations.
His proposal had strong merits, but Hugh Templin and others could see difficulties. The plan did not address problems at the headwaters of the Grand and several tributaries. There was no proposal for reforestation or a reservoir in the Luther area. Breithaupt believed the reservoir below Elora would become a summer resort, but did not address the possibility water levels would rise and fall dramatically, depending on rainfall and runoff.
One advantage of the plan was the water rerouted to Niagara would produce power exclusively for Ontario. In answer to critics who claimed there would be American objections, Breithaupt noted the Americans planned to use the Chicago River to divert Great Lakes water to the Mississippi, which would permanently decrease flows at Niagara Falls.
Breithaupt’s 1924 proposal created much discussion, but no action to build dams or other measures to regulate and utilize the waters of the Grand.
The dam below Elora was never built, and though it remains as a possibility 84 years after Breithaupt delivered his paper, the likelihood that it will be built diminishes annually. Breithaupt did live to see the first dam constructed above Fergus, work done on the Luther Marsh reservoir, and tentative plans drawn for the Conestoga Dam before his death in 1944 at the age of 87.
Breithaupt’s 1924 Grand River proposals outlined the most complete vision he had for the river, but he made many others over the decades.
The prophetic engineer is important for other reasons in addition to his Grand River proposals. He pioneered the concept of town planning in Kitchener. He began construction of an electric railway line from Bridgeport to Elora and Fergus that was scuttled only by the outbreak of World War I and the subsequent economic inflation. The line, an extension of the family-owned streetcar system in Kitchener and Waterloo, was intended to promote industrial development, and to bring city people to enjoy the recreational potential of Fergus and Elora. Breithaupt was also the first president of the Waterloo Historical Society, and served as president of the Ontario Historical Society.
The family fortune allowed W.H. Breithaupt to indulge himself in promoting environmental and civic causes, but he was also a distinguished engineer. He wrote a number of technical articles, and designed railway bridges for lines all over North America.
Most of all, Breithaupt deserves recognition as the first person to study seriously, beginning in the 1890s, the environmental deterioration from the first generations of settlement. He was the first to gather quantitative data, and to propose workable remedies.
Though it took almost a half century after his first studies, many of his goals did see fruition, in the form of effective flood control and recreational development.
William H. Breithaupt would be both surprised and disappointed to learn that some of his proposals are still not achieved more than a century after he first proposed them, and particularly the development of the power potential of the Grand. There are a handful of small generators, but they utilize only a small percentage of the potential of the river.
Were he alive, he would certainly advocate that the power of the Grand be utilized to produce electricity, along with solar and wind power, to reduce the generation of greenhouse gases by human activities.