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THE ST. LAWRENCE -- GREAT LAKES WATERWAY -- The St. Lawrence River-Great Lakes waterway extends 2300 miles from the Atlantic Ocean to the head of the group of inland seas which lie at the heart of the North American continent. The waters of the Great Lakes feed the St. Lawrence, making it one of the most regular-flowing rivers in the world. Sailing the locks and channels and the lakes of this long fresh-water route, ships are lifted 602 feet from the level of the sea, As a self-sustaining and self-liquidating enterprise, however, the St. Lawrence Seaway extends from Montreal Harbour to Lake Erie; it includes the Welland Canal. Features of the route are shown on ed map. ; a ke ay part of the sixteenth century the French explorer, Jacques Cartier, sailing up the broad St. Lawrence from the Atlantic was turned back by the rushing waters of the Lachine Rapids just west of what is now Montreal and was thereby forced to abandon his dream of finding a route to the fabled Orient. Other rapids and falls lay at intervals beyond. -- : At various times during the intervening 300-odd years, canals and locks were built around the natural barriers to navigation, in the St. Lawrence River and in the waters connecting the Great Lakes. The earliest canals were dug to allow water-borne passage of the "canots de maitre" of the fur-trading voyageurs and to carry Explorer and Priest into the Indian-populated fastnesses of North America. With settlement and development of industry and agriculture, canaliza- tion was spurred on by the desire to make use of the economical water route which the waters of the Great Lakes Basin offered for the transportation of goods in and out of this vast area of the con- inent. ae 1900, 14 feet was the regulating depth of canals, into the Great Lakes, although certain of them--Sault Ste. Marie, for example-- were deeper. In 1932 the existing Welland Canal was opened. It was the fourth canal built between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie to overcome the great Falls of Niagara. i By 1959, as a result of the joint efforts of the Canadian St. Law- rence Seaway Authority and the United States Saint Lawrence Sea- way Development Corporation, 27 foot depths were available from Montreal to Lake Erie. Deepening the channels above Lake Erie to Seaway standards by the Corps of Engineers, United States Army, is proceeding apace, and by 1962, 27-foot depths will be available throughout the Upper Lakes. The Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario and the Power Authority of the State of New York have completed works in the International Rapids Section of the St. Lawrence River to convert into electricity the energy that once expended itself by tumbling through the rapids west of Cornwall, Ontario. A 90-square-mile power-pool was formed, bounded on the North by Canada and on the South by the United States and ships now sail its surface. Turbines installed and in production at the Barnhart Island (U.S.).-Cornwall (Canada) generating plants produce 940,000 kilowatts for each country, to supply an important part of the ever-growing need by home and industry for vast amounts of electrical energy. By means of a great international engineering scheme, the two demands for power and for passage were served. In the 400-mile journey between Montreal and Lake Erie (which stands at 572 feet above sea level) the Seaway system serves to lift or lower vessels 550 feet to or from - level of Montreal Harbour, situated 1,000 miles from the Atlantic cean. Westward across Lake Erie, lie the dredged channels (the rise is eight feet) through the Detroit River, Lake St. Clair and the St. Clair River and beyond, across Lake Huron, the St. Mary's River and the locks at Sault Ste. Marie. The lift, by means of one of the four parallel United States locks at Saulte Ste. Marie, Michigan or the one Canadian lock at Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, is some 22 feet, and thus, arriving upon the waters of Lake Superior, a ship will have climbed no less than 602 feet from the sea. PRACTICES AT THE LOCKS Vessels traveling this route are under their own power at all times, and sail individually. e lock side to which vessels secure, to be raised or lowered in pee, 1s manned at all locks by a St. Lawrence Seaway crew of our line-handlers and a lock master, around the clock, seven days a age throughout the navigation season. A lock-motorman at each in of the lock completes the seven-man crew. There are three crews each lock, working in eight-hour shifts, or 21 men detailed to this wos at each of the 15 Seaway locks. act Lakes area, bounded generally on the South by the ek : States and on the North by Canada, contains probably the iis est industrial complex of the world. The steel plants here (pro- -- ng more than 30% of the world's steel) have called for over half entury upon the iron resources (and the coal and limestone) of the es 241 continent. And the extensive agricultural areas beyond have pro- duced vast harvests of grain which have been transported in large measure by way of the lake route and by means, largely, of specially developed ships, during the navigation season. The very considerable reserves of Quebec and Labrador iron ore have now come into demand by the Great Lakes steel mills and this commodity constitutes a major source of traffic on the St. Lawrence Seaway, both between Montreal and Lake Ontario and on the Wel- land Canal. With a return cargo in the form of grain downbound, the traffic pattern thus takes its most significant form. Other bulk commodities, such as petroleum and wood products bolster this trade. The variety of general cargo that moves on the Seaway and Great La 1s most diverse, however, and is present also in considerable me. It is in the development of foreign trade, and the movement of general cargo particularly, that ports are most active in the pro- vision of new handling and storing facilities. With an area of about 1,200,000 square miles (one-sixth of North America) and a population of about 65 million (slightly less than one-third the combined United States-Canadian population), it pro- duces about 78 per cent of the North American steel, adds half the value of its manufacturers, and produces more than 40 per cent of its food and feed. To handle inland traffic there hase developed a special type of vessel, the North American "laker." These vary in size, but the smaller ones are tending to disappear from the system, outmoded by the large size ships, many of them now being as much as 730 feet in length with 75-foot beam. These large ships can carry cargoes of up to 25,000 tons of iron ore, or 1,000,000 bushels of grain and are no longer confined, as heretofore, to the Great Lakes, but may proceed by means of the Seaway, to ocean ports such as Montreal and those of the Gulf of St. Lawrence downstream. Small ocean vessels of some 14-foot draught have been sailing between the Atlantic and the Great Lakes for many years, but the 27-foot depth and the enlarged locks between Montreal an Lake On- tario now enable much larger ocean ships to trade into the inland lakes. Some of these exceed 550 feet in length and can carry a cargo of over 14,000 tons into or out of the Great Lakes. The construction of large locks and deep channels between Mont- real and Lake Ontario, to replace the outmoded 14-foot system, broke a bottleneck which had required trans-shipment at Prescott or Odgensburg of individual laker cargoes into seven or eight small canal ships for the final 120 miles to Montreal. Vessels engaged in Seaway service experience line haul costs which are about one-fifth of those experienced by railroads in spe- cialized bulk commodity movements. They are about one-twelfth of those experienced by tractor-trailer combinations in highway move- ments. These vessels can haul a ton of grain from Chicago to Liver- pool at less cost than rail can haul it from Chicago to an Atlantic coast port. They can haul it at less cost than a tractor-trailer can haul it from Chicago to Detroit. When it is considered that the sailing distance between most of the Great Lakes cities and British and Northern European ports is shorter than from the Atlantic seaboard to those destinations, ad- vantages of this newest of the world's important trade routes will be apparent. Green's Great Lakes Directory The Original Publishers of Coal Docks on the © Great Lakes since 1910