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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (53708)	7/23/2000 10:33:28 PM
From: Crocodile	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

Fred, This was my Thursday last week... I think you would have enjoyed it... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Drove back down to the St. Lawrence Seaway to take a couple of pics of a Blue Bird bus that I spotted last week... It was so neat... just sitting there in someone's yard... with a bunch of weeds growing up all around it and inside of it... And its headlights and grille looking like a face... one that has been watching everything happening on that street for about... maybe 25 years or so... Then, we drove around in Maitland, where the bus is. It's an old town settled around the late 1700s to early 1800s... Lots of stone houses which are beautiful... and a local landmark called the Blue Church... tiny little wooden church which has been on that site for ages. Saw a huge round stone tower and went to look at it. It was truly amazing... Tall... I don't know how tall...I'm thinking perhaps 60 feet tall. It was an old wind-powered grist mill...built in 1829. Just the stone tower is left... but it's absolutely gorgeous.... There was a little sign in front of it with a drawing of how the tower once looked. At one time, it had a revolving wooden cap with 4 big sail-type blades so that it would turn in the wind.. But I think that what really blew me away were the windows... A vertical row up the front towards the road, and an absolutely identical row up the back facing out onto the channel of the seaway... So when you stand in front of it, you could see right through the tower...and see boats going by out beyond in the channel.. It was so very symmetrical...so perfect..... And then, when you looked up inside of it, the open top where the wooden roof once was is like a great ocula... open to the sky with the clouds above... and there were huge remnants of timbers sticking out of the stone on the inside... which would have supported the floors inside, and been part of the original grist mill... And there were a few pigeons sitting on the timbers and in little niches in the walls of stone... The colour of the stone and the timbers were so very..... ....brown....warm shades of brown and ochre... made you feel all warm... like the feeling of sun shining on you... just to look at it... Like the stone was full of warmth and absorbed sunlight... Then we just drove along the river... Found a museum that we will go back to another time... It's called the Woodworker's Museum... believe it houses quite a collection of tools. From there, we left the Seaway area and began driving up along the Rideau Canal system which leads towards home. We had heard that there was a blacksmith shop at Jones Falls Locks, so we decided to stop there to walk around. We parked and walked in along the locks... they're a really high series of locks... Typical of the various sets of canal locks, but these have a lot of lift... think the various sets that are part of the Jones Falls group have a 60 foot lift. After watching the lockmasters locking some boats through one series of gates, we walked back along the trail that leads through the forest to the blacksmith shop. That was really nice as the forest trail led over some footbridges and up over some huge granite boulders and rock cuts... Parks Canada has a guy working in one of the original blacksmith's shops that supplied "hardware" for the canal. As we approached through the forest, we could hear the ringing of the hammer on iron as it was worked over an anvil. The blacksmith was making some hooks and other pieces when we dropped in to watch. The shop was built in 1837... it's small and square made entirely of stone. The forge is right in the center of the shop and has a chimney going up through the center of the roof... The forge was located in the center for a particular reason..... because a lot of the metal that was being forged would be very long... long iron straps and hinges for the great timber locks. When a piece was going to be really long, they could put the piece of iron bar in through a shop window and position it in the coals of the forge in the middle of the shop. If the forge was off in the corner, this wouldn't have been possible. In this way, the iron could be worked on... half inside and half-outside when necessary.. Well... that was good, but the BEST PART was next... We went up to the top of a hill where there is a "defensible lockmaster's house"... a square stone house with little slits for windows... Then we hiked down the other side of the hill, to where the original river gorge was before the canal was built to go around it. There was a small wooden dam there to block off a small gorge, but then... in the main part of the gorge, there is another dam that is made of stone... It's all curved... pushing out against the force of the river... in a big arc... The huge blocks of stone are rectangular... but they aren't laid the way you might expect that they would be... they are standing vertically...so that their long sides are vertical... The dam is 61 feet high... which, back when it was built in 1827 made it the tallest dam in North America... It's fabulous... BUT THEN!!! Get this.... There is a place where 3 big...tubes..... quite a few feet in diameter...perhaps 12 feet in diameter... which penetrate through the original stone dam... From there, the tubes lead downhill to the turbines of an early hydro electric generating plant... BUT WHAT IS REALLY COOL IS The 3 big "tubes" that go way down the hill and which are about a dozen feet in diameter ARE ALL MADE OF WOOD!!! They are just amazing... I took some photos and will post them somewhere if they turn out.. but they won't give any feel at all for the massiveness of the tubes... and the cool way that they start out... like a bunch of half-barrels inside of each other... layer upon layer... where they hook up to the metal collars coming through the dam... And the massive iron ribs that wrap all around the wooden tubes holding them together... As I looked at the tubes I'm thinking: YIKES!!! How did they BUILD this thing??!!! NO!! How did someone ever DREAM this thing into existence??? Seriously... It's like some kind of weird Leonardo Da Vinci type of thing... It seems thoroughly IMPOSSIBLE!!! Because these tubes must be about.. I dunno..... maybe 300 feet long or so??? Well.... I tell you.... it was really something to see... Anyhow, that was my Thursday... Here are some links to pages and .jpegs to some of the things which I've mentioned here. Unfortunately, I haven't found any of the wooden tubes in the hydro dam... Will have to see if my pics turn out... ~~~~~~~~~~ This is a photo of one of the sets of locks in Jones Falls. The "gates" are made of massive timbers which are painted grey. All of the many sets of locks throughout the Rideau Canal system look much like this: home.korax.net This is a photo of the stonework of the dam. Notice how the big blocks of stone are standing vertically rather than laying in courses like bricks? rideau-info.com This is an aerial view of the Jones Falls Lock complex. The dam is at the top right... and the long tubes come down to the hydro plant below (this pic doesn't actually show them though). Meanwhile, the locks bring boats down from above... down to a turning basin... and then down another series of locks to get them down to Whitefish Lake below.. rideau-info.com If you feel like doing a bit of "poking around", here is a page of thumbnails for larger photos of various locks in the Rideau system... This will give you some idea of what is around the area that I live in and where I do a lot of my canoeing. rideau-info.com