European Settlement and Tamarack

Wellington Water Watchers: As a solo artist as well as a member of the folk group Tamarack, he has recorded multiple songs about the Grand, tracing its First Nations history, its European settlement and its fascinating gorges, according to Globe and Mail. She Is Fickle might well be the song that best captures the Grand: Sometimes in the past she been As wide as the mighty Nile, And other times she just as thin As an undertaker smile. Gordon is a city councillor, a founding member of the Wellington Water Watchers and also a professional musician. So thin, in fact, that in the summer of 1936, the river vanished, its bed completely dry for some 80 kilometres between its source near Dundalk and the town of Fergus. In a report presented at the first annual convention of the Canadian Institute on Sewage and Sanitation, held in Toronto on Oct. 18, 1934, it was said that the industrial waste from two abattoirs, three tire and rubber factories, three tanneries, a glue factory and a dye works make the Kitchener sewage the strongest known in Canada. Once pristine, once navigable by steamwheelers running upstream as far as Brantford, once subject for 19th-century landscape artist Homer Watson bucolic The Flood Gate that hangs in the National Gallery, the Grand River was for decades so abused by waste and industrial pollution that, in 1937, Maclean magazine described it as an open sewer downstream from Kitchener and Waterloo. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.