The Hamlet
The story of the Caledon hamlet of Cataract begins with just that – the cataract, a large, sheer downpouring of rushing water; a waterfall that best shows off the essence of the Niagara Escarpment. It sits on the very edge of the spectacular Credit River Canyon, as the river drops a dramatic seventy feet and becomes a thunderous source of power.
The geography of Cataract determined its history as early settlers sought to harness this power and the area’s alluring resources. As early as 1818, the Credit River valley was rumoured to have gold deposits, and as gold fever hit, many people came to the area to seek their fortune. One of them was William Grant, and although he came up empty in the quest for gold, he discovered a salty spring below the falls.
This was of great interest, since salt was both scarce and expensive in Upper Canada, and had to be imported from the States. Grant persuaded his former employer to back his expedition, and the result was a village called Gleniffer. However, the salt proved too deep to mine and both the project and the settlement were abandoned in the 1880s.
In 1858, Richard Church, another entrepreneur, purchased the remains of Gleniffer for $100 and, being a modest man, renamed it after himself - Church’s Falls. To an existing sawmill, powered by river water, he added a grist mill to convert grain into flour. Soon the hamlet added a woolen mill, stave and barrel operation, broom factory, planning mill, brewery and two hotels which sprang up to service the business the railways brought – the Junction House and what is now Cataract Hall.
The first post office opened in 1865, and there was mail delivery twice a day – which would be awfully nice now. About this time, the hamlet’s name was changed to Cataract by the railway, to differentiate it from a town down the line called Churchville.
The Forks of the Credit area that Cataract is in was an important centre in the 19th Century. Three stone quarries employing 400 men provided stone for the Ontario legislative building at Queen’s Park in Toronto, Casa Loma, the Old City Hall on Bay Street and many majestic University of Toronto buildings.
Visiting Cataract today, it’s hard to imagine what a hectic place it was. Trains stopped here four times a day, with coaches laden with passengers followed by cattle cars crowded with cattle destined for the stock yards in Toronto.
A second gold rush apparently took place in the valley close to us in 1873. A rumour quickly spread through the area and down to Lake Ontario that there was gold in the Caledon Hills. The area was swarmed with prospectors and fortune-hunters who searched in vain, and many of whom perished in an intensely cold winter.
A big part of Cataract was the mill which towered over the falls. Church sold the grist mill in 1880, and the wooden structure burned down in 1881. The Wheeler Brothers, who owned it then, rebuilt the mill with stone quarried from just beneath the falls – and today you can see signs of that mining activity. It burned again in 1885, and shortly thereafter was sold to inventor and entrepreneur John Deagle for $1,800.
Deagle’s claim to fame to that time had been as the brains behind the spinning tub washing machine. Deagle was fascinated by this new thing called electricity and he and his brother spent five years converting the mill into an electric powerplant building. They made everything by hand, from the waterwheel to the dynamo to the poles and wire. In 1899, Cataract was set ablaze by three weak light bulbs on a pole as sort of an advertisement for the power plant. Then Deagle successfully transported power over 5 miles of wires to a farm, supplying the very first commercial electricity in Ontario . The lights were carbon lamps, not much better than the coal oil lamps they were meant to replace, and Deagle had trouble signing up other customers until better tungsten lamp technology arrived.
Deagle was also an innovator, and designed an entirely new power generator based on the principle of a revolving field rather than the old revolving aramture model. As a result, business boomed. In 1902, Deagle signed up nearby Erin, then Orangeville. He dreamt up a plan to expand the plant by digging a 200-metre tunnel from the six-acre Cataract Lake south to Brimstone which would increase the water’s drop to almost 150 feet. But massive spring flooding in 1921 caused severe damage, and washed out Dominion Road and the plans for a tunnel.That road followed an ancient Indian trail, and started right at the corner of Cataract Hall’s property, ending at the Forks of the Credit. Today you can walk from the house down the old roadway, across the Credit Valley Railway tracks to the falls, past the power plant ruins, and see where the road used to hug the bank of the river canyon. By the way, it was called Dominion Road because the first horse and buggy drove along the completed roadway one Dominion Day. There remains a short section of Dominion Road today running into the Forks of the Credit Road.
Not long after the flood, Deagle sold the business as a going concern in 1923 for $50,000, just as the lights were going on in Belfountain, the Forks of the Credit and Caledon Village. The company then went bankrupt, changed hands again and became the Caledon Electric company in 1925.
During World War Two, the company was sold to Ontario Hydro for $100,000. Hydro closed the Cataract hydro generating station in 1947, moved the machinery out and blew the dam up in 1953, leaving towering cement and stone walls you can visit today. That blast was a controversial one, as it caused the popular Cataract Lake to drain to nothing more than the river above the falls that you see now. Many families moved out in dismay after their precious lake disappeared.
The hamlet fell largely silent before becoming an exclusive residential area, set in its spectacular geography. In recent years the former railway line that played such a role in the development of this boom town was removed, and the bed became the popular Elora-Cataract Trailway.
The Credit Valley Railway was completed in 1879 with the line extending from Toronto to Streetsville where it branched north to Orangeville. Cataract was the second major junction on the line, where a branch split off and headed west to Elora.
The CPR bought the line in 1884, just in time for a construction boom caused by the erection of the Parliament Buildings at Queen’s Park in 1886. Those buildings were made of Credit Valley limestone, taken from the Forks of the Credit quarries.
So, when you drive up University Avenue today, and see the pink stones, think of that rock being hauled up the valley near Cataract, being loaded onto rail cars by horse and rope and disappearing amid a thundering cloud of steam and smoke across the trestle bridge at the Forks.
