Montreal as an Island
Written by Victoria C. Slonosky
The spring ice break up season was always a tricky time for Montrealers. These days, unless we live off-island, we tend not to think too much about the practical geographical fact of the city Montreal as an island in the St Lawrence River. When the dire condition of the old Champlain bridge was discovered and plans for the new bridge were being drawn up, there was a fair amount of grumbling , “I never leave the island; why should my taxes pay for all those suburbanites coming into the city?” The Champlain bridge is a vital piece of Canadian infrastructure, linking the Atlantic provinces, Eastern Canada, and the US to Central Canada. It is the most heavily travelled bridge in the country. As Montreal is an island, it has always needed goods and supplies brought in across the river. Electricity too: for those who remember the 1998 ice storm, they might also remember that, at one point, only one of the power lines supplying the city across the water was still functioning.
Until the Victoria railway bridge was opened in 1859, there was no permanent link across the St Lawrence to Montreal, and it wasn’t until the Jacques-Cartier bridge was opened in 1934 that there was a permanent crossing for pedestrians and carts or cars. In summer, boats and ferries supplied the city, from as near as Longueuil or as far away as Europe.
In winter, ice roads across the frozen river went to Longueuil, St Lambert, and La Prairie. Some years, there were disputes as to which town was responsible for maintaining the ice road (which seemed to devolve into complaints about who had shoveled the most snow).
The worst times were during the freeze and break-up of river ice. During the early winter and spring, the river was too dangerous to cross, and Montreal was cut off from the rest of the continent. People either pushed the limits of boats amid the currents and ice floes, or of their sleds on melting ice, risking their lives on the deceptively solid surface. Every few years, there were tragedies: on Dec 4, 1831, John Samuel McCord recorded that “Captain Perry, late of Waterloo, drowned crossing from Longueuil to Montreal.” (Weather Journal of J. S. McCord, McCord Museum Archives.)
It’s no wonder that Montrealers, including our weather observers, anxiously watched the state of the river. Not only was the river critical to the transport of goods and people, the annual spring ice break up also often led to catastrophic flooding, something still familiar to us in the 21st century. But there is enough to say about flooding for another blog post (or ten).
This post is the sole responsibility of its author.
It first appeared on DRAW Blog on August 19, 2020. DRAW (Data Rescue: Archives and Weather) is a citizen science project to transcribe and make accessible for analysis the McGill Observatory records from 1874 to 1954.
