Messrs. Gzowsky, Keefer, Forsythe, Trautwine, Legge, Nish, and Slippell all submitted plans up to 1873.
A picture of the results of the improvements during the intervening period is to be found in Mr. T.S. Brown’s retrospect, already quoted.
“I visited it (the harbour)” says the same writer, “at the end of fifty-four years, on the 28th of May, 1872. And what did I see?[1]
“A canal of the largest dimensions coming in at Windmill Point, and the old fields converted into basins, filled with steamers, schooners and barges, one side fringed by manufactories, and the other by lofty warehouses, and platforms filled with merchandise.
“From ‘Pointe à Blondeau,’ or Grey Nun Street, to the Barracks, there is a high stone revetment wall, supporting Commissioners Street, with Ramps at convenient distances, leading to a broad platform or wharf running down to below the barracks and Dalhousie Square, along which is a track for Railway Cars, and from which project many piers, one connecting with the Island before mentioned, and others lower down, extending further out.
“This platform or line wharf, and the piers, are covered and filled with merchandise, of all discriptions, in bars, bundles, casks, cases, boxes and bales, a part being covered with temporary sheds.
“The quantity and weight is so immense that one wonders where it comes from, and where it goes to, but the immense mass extending along Harbour and Canal for a mile, is but a small portion of what is passing into or through the port, for while countless carts and cars, are daily removing from one side, steamers and ships fill up every space by discharging on the other, with steam power and regiments of laborers. The taking in of the cargo is going on at the same time and elevators alongside the ships are taking from propellors alongside from the west and far west thousands of bushels of grain. Instead of the half a dozen brigs of 1818, with an aggregate tonnage of twelve to fifteen hundred tons discharging slowly with skids on a rough beach, there lays one steamer that will measure more than the whole put together.
“In all there is in port, stretched along the wharves and piers from Grey Nun Street to below the Barracks, 21 Ocean Steamers, 22,612 tons; 20 Ships, 17,710 tons; 22 Barques, 12,409 tons; 3 Brigs, 760 tons; 4 Brigantines and Schooners, 278 tons, in all 70 Vessels with an aggregate tonnage of 53,769 tons.
“The shore (I have often seen it bare), below the foot of St. Sulpice Street has been dredged and wharfed to accommodate ships drawing twenty feet of water. A Quebec Steamer, not stumpy, low and flush deck, but long, built on a skiff model, with two stories of staterooms raised above the deck, is at a pier at the bottom of Jacques Cartier Square, stretching out beyond the limits of the old firewood rafts, brought down by farmers from Chateaguay and neighbouring regions, to be sold in June, when they were impatient to get home, for $2.00 a cord.
“Directly below is a fleet of ‘Market Boats,’ really elegant steamers, of modern build, that navigate to all ports down to ‘Three Rivers.’