The Batteau Railway
by Dan Buchanan

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During the American War of Independence, a wave of British Loyalists moved to Upper Canada with the promise of land. As they arrived in the Bay of Quinte and travelled west to York or Newark, Asa Weller—a resident of the Carrying Place—saw an opportunity. Batteaux—flat-bottomed boats—were commonly used in the late eighteenth century to carry supplies and goods as well as passengers travelling east and west along the north shore of Lake Ontario. At the Bay of Quinte, however, travellers were forced to unload their cargo and carry everything across the portage to Wellers Bay before continuing on to Lake Ontario. As traffic increased in both volume and intensity, dragging boats across the sand became a painstaking, back-breaking task. Innovative and ambitious, Asa Weller solved this problem by constructing the “batteau railway” across the one-and-a-half-mile portage. For the next three decades, his facility became so integral to the journey along Lake Ontario’s northern shore that travellers rarely noted it in their accounts. So, what did it look like? And how exactly was it used? In The Batteau Railway, Dan Buchanan explores Mr. Weller’s groundbreaking transport system. Through meticulous research, he vividly recreates the bustling Carrying Place of the early 1800s and reveals how Weller’s railway became indispensable—not only to settlers and traders but also to the British war effort during the War of 1812.

www.danbuchananhistoryguy.com

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For over three decades, Dan Buchanan has immersed himself in Canadian historical research, both scholarly and hands-on. A passionate historian and genealogist, he has curated an extensive collection of interconnected family trees, available at www.treesbydan.com. Dan is the author of several acclaimed books, including Murder in the Family: The Dr. King Story (Dundurn Press, 2015), 38 Hours to Montreal: William Weller and the Governor General's Race of 1840 (FriesenPress, 2018), The Wreck of HMS Speedy: The Tragedy That Shook Upper Canada (Milner & Associates, Inc., 2020), and A History of the Murray Canal (FriesenPress, 2024). He lives in Brighton, Ontario, and is a member of the Brighton Heritage Advisory Committee.

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Contributors

Author

Dan Buchanan

Foreword by

Thomas Malcomson

FriesenPress Editions