20 Things Nobody Tells You About The Great Lakes

On the first of July 1958, at 8:01 in the morning, 27 tonnes of explosives breached a cofferdam and nine villages between Cornwall and Morrisburg went under in four days. Two diversions in the bush north of Thunder Bay put more water into Lake Superior than Chicago takes out. And the border that runs through four of the five lakes never touches the fifth. What's beneath YOUR town? Personalized 15-page report — the rock, the name, the vanished places, your town's oldest map → https://hiddenprovinces.com Twenty things about the Great Lakes that replace an assumption with a document — a treaty article, a court decree, a commission order or a survey. Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are one lake by water level. Chicago's diversion runs on a Supreme Court decree, averaged over forty years. The Long Lac and Ogoki diversions, the 1950 Niagara Treaty that halves the falls at night, the eight Welland locks and the 2023 strike that stopped thirteen of fifteen, the barge door at Chicago, the Poe Lock at Sault Ste. Marie, the tilt measured at Rossport and Burlington, the St. Clair River study, the record low of 2013 and the record highs of 2019 and 2020, the Newsweek piece behind "never gives up her dead," the sea lamprey convention of 1954, Rush-Bagot of 1817, the island that never existed in the Treaty of Paris, the Lost Villages of 1958, the compensating works at Sault Ste. Marie and the Moses-Saunders dam at Cornwall — and the six commissioners of the International Joint Commission who sit closest to owning the water. Toronto, Thunder Bay, Nipigon, Sault Ste. Marie, Sarnia, Windsor, Port Colborne, St. Catharines, Hamilton, Kingston, Cornwall, Morrisburg, Kahnawake, Akwesasne, Manitoulin, Rossport, Duluth, Chicago, Massena. Figures come from the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909, the 1950 Niagara Treaty, the Supreme Court decree in Wisconsin v. Illinois (1980), the International Joint Commission's 1985 diversions report and its orders of approval, the International Upper Great Lakes Study, Mainville and Craymer (GSA Bulletin, 2005), the US Army Corps of Engineers, Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, the St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corporation, Ontario Power Generation and the Canadian Encyclopedia. Where two official sources disagree, both numbers are given on air. Where a claim is a headline rather than a document, the narration says so. Subscribe to The Hidden Provinces — beneath the map.