Slides

In September of 1836, George Buchanan opened the first timber slide on the south side of the Chaudière falls. Built between the Victoria and Chaudière islands, it replaced the narrow channel which had been dredged in 1827, and soon many cribs were being sent down the chute on a daily basis. The slide started three hundred yards above the falls, and covered three quarters of a mile in stages, each stage ending in a level stretch [Brault 1946, Haig 1975, Mika 1982]. In 1845, the government’s board of works transformed its unused timber channel into a slide. The two slides on the south side of the falls competed so much with the slide which Ruggles Wright had constructed in 1829 on the north side of the falls, that Wright’s slide was sold to the government in 1849 [Brault 1946].