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A Strange Saga: Despite Reports and Fans, A Heritage Bridge in Eden Mills Is in Danger of Being Destroyed
A Strange Saga: Despite Reports and Fans, A Heritage Bridge in Eden Mills Is in Danger of Being Destroyed
Michael Keefer
Eramosa Township may be the only place in Canada where a man can saunter out
of his house at 6 o'clock on a Monday evening, stumble home at 3 a.m., tell his wife he's
spent the intervening hours at a meeting of the township council, and be believed.
It's not that people are abnormally gullible in this little corner of rural Ontario, or
that we're so tired of life we have nothing better to do than cool our heels in the
township's barren council chambers. Yet odd things have been happening in those
chambers recently, and the oddest of them have to do with the heritage Bowstring Bridge
in my own village of Eden Mills.
Just 50 miles west of downtown Toronto, a side road winds down from the Guelph
Line into the Eramosa River valley.
The houses on either side are mostly mid-19 th century and there are two stone
churches of the same vintage, a stage-coach hotel (now a private home) and a couple of
ruined mills.
If you've had the good sense to bring a canoe, you can drift on the millpond
(restored by villagers with 3,000 hours of volunteer labor and $60,000 worth of fundraising), encountering beaver, snapping turtles, kingfishers, a great blue heronor
perhaps even the osprey that pulled a bass out of the pond not 30 feet from where I was
swimming two summers ago.
pedestrian and traffic safety, and the village's social and economic well-being.
These recommendations were echoed by the 82-page report of a committee of
council itself. The provincial minister of Culture wrote to offer her assistance and cooperation in preserving the bridge.
But council wasn't going to let its head be turned by mere facts, or by such trifling
considerations as democratic due process. On Aug. 22, 1994, council announced that it
would not have space on its Sept. 6 agenda to hear any delegations from Eden Mills.
But at that Sept. 6 meeting, a previously tabled motion was revivedeven though
the bridge wasn't on the agenda and even though no formal notice had been given. At
2:15 a.m., an unusual hour for business of any kind, let alone business not on the agenda,
council voted to replace the bridge.
One might think that even the most mulish township council wouldn't want to
repeat a trick like that. But this council has since openly proclaimed its intention to open
up Eden Mills to the trucking industry. We're not talking subtle here.
Early this year, the Ontario Ministry of Culture's conservation review board held a
three-day hearing about whether or not the bridge's heritage status should be removed so
council can demolish it.
On April 6, 1998, the board announced that it found the evidence in favour of
preserving the bridge overwhelming. The board found Eramosa Township council to be
in contravention of the Ontario Heritage Act, declared that demolition would contravene
the township's own official plan and the Grand Strategy (the Canadian Heritage River
management plan for the Grand River basin, which includes the Eramosa), and stated that
Council needed to do a full environmental assessment of the project.
Reeve David Adsett announced a public meeting on Aril 14 to discuss these
findings. On April 12 he cancelled this meeting, promising to re-schedule it. And then, on
April 20, with no public notice and at a meeting whose agenda contained no inkling of
the matter, his council votedin defiance of the conservation review board's reportto
remove the bridge's heritage designation and to let tenders for its demolition.
A fight is brewing
The Friends of Eden Mills, a group of local ratepayers, has taken the township to
court; a judicial review of the township's decisions is scheduled for the week of June 3.
As might be expected from a village like Eden Mills, there's a literary angle to the
story. Jeffrey Stinson, the heritage architect who assessed the Bowstring Bridge in 1994,
is an expert on the 1925-1930 construction of Toronto's Bloor Street viaduct over the Don
Valleyan engineering feat that forms the context for Michael Ondaatje's novel In The
Skin Of A Lion.
In his 1994 assessment, Stinson went so far as to compare the Bowstring Bridge
to to the Bloor Street viaduct: Although from the perspective of a government official at
Queen's Park this bridge may seem small and distant, he wrote, it is of greater
importance to this locale than the much larger bridges over the Don Valley are to the
Toronto community, which interacts with them in less significant ways.
If township succeeds in demolishing the Bowstring Bridge, something more
precious than steel and concrete will be lost. The bridge is at the heart of Eden Mills: it
keeps fast, heavy traffic out and safeguards the human scale of a village that is unique in
retaining a largely 19th-century streetscape.
So what are Eramosa council's motives for destroying this bridge and gutting our
village? What exactly is being hiddendevelopment interests, aggregate hauling interests
inside the skin of this mule?
Michael Keefer of Eden Mills wrote Lunar Perspectives
and is a professor at the University of Guelph.