In the spring, I was slowly making my way through Marjorie Freeman Campbell’s excellent book of local history from 1966, A Mountain and a City. One of the many passages that caught my attention concerned Augustus Jones, the 18th-century crown surveyor responsible for laying out the grid that Hamilton’s main streets still run on today:
‘These side [north-south] roads…are remarkably straight, with only the odd error, but the east-west concession roads such as Main Street and Barton have a deflection at every intersection with the side roads. This is especially noticeable on Main Street at night. Run your eye along the line of street lights and you will see them jog at Ottawa Street, at Gage Avenue and Sherman, at Wentworth, at Wellington, and particularly at Queen.’
The reason for these bends lay in the sixty-six foot surveyor’s chain of the day, composed of one hundred jointed links. As this chain was dragged over rocks, across stony streams, and through the tangle of fallen trees and undergrowth, the joints wore thin and the chain lengthened resulting in inaccuracies.
At first, I wasn’t sure exactly why I found this piece of information interesting—much of my writing involves trying to better articulate some intuitive attraction.
The first instalment of this newsletter also featured Augustus Jones and his lines in relation to the Between the Lakes Treaty. I’ve been exploring the connections between land surveying and colonization for a little while now — the historians Louis Gentilcore and Kate Donkin called surveyors “the vanguard of settlement.” While the spectre of colonialism still looms here, this instalment will be more localized in its focus.
Thinking about it more, I realized the Campbell passage above clarified something about Hamilton for me. At times, the city can feel meticulously designed and mired in the endless delays of process, but to learn that it was originally laid out by a group of guys stumbling through the woods with sixty-six feet of chain was one of those moments where the foundation of the city, the time before Hamilton, becomes visible.
Another point of attraction was that the mistakes of Jones & co. have lived on, that more than two hundred years later, the layout of many streets in the city are in some way determined by the stretch of a couple links of brass chain.
My first thought when I read about the intersection of Main and Queen being crooked was that I was pretty sure it has been a historically dangerous intersection for pedestrians which led, in part, to Queen Street being converted to two-way in 2020. The information that I could find on pedestrian fatal and injury collisions seemed to confirm it as tied for the second most dangerous intersection in the city from 2015-2019.
More recent data suggests that there have been fewer collisions involving pedestrians in the past two years, so perhaps the two-way conversion is working. Either way, I was curious if there might be some connection, if Jones’s deflection might be partly to blame for the collisions (of course, along with a host of other factors including the mind-altering effects of the personal automobile).
I couldn’t find any conclusive connection between Jones’s lines and the number of collisions at the intersection. But whether or not his lines are causing collisions, they are still shaping our contemporary experience of the city. Short of demolishing the whole downtown (which we did once, not too long ago) and realigning the streets, we are left to make do with Jones’ crooked line, so I decided to stay with the lines as my image.
Two centuries later, five lanes of traffic flowing uphill, tracing Jones’ drifting line with their steering wheels, baring left around the rising sun.
This was my first attempt at an ending for the resultant poem. The rising sun was fun, but it seemed too triumphant for what I was thinking about, so I wondered about flipping the time to night.
This morning, five lanes of traffic flowing uphill, tracing his drifting line with their steering wheels, bearing left around the blood moon.
I liked the moon here, but it also seemed like a cheap way to try and elevate the poem at the end, turning it to the cosmic. What I was really thinking about was how this one action by Jones resonates across time in the shift in a driver’s hands — the scale needed to be much smaller.
This afternoon, the Roads Department echoes his drifting line across five lanes of asphalt for commuters to trace with their wheels come morning.
This is where I eventually landed. I brought the word “echo” in explicitly and added in an echo of the echo: from Jones’s line to the line painters’ lines, to the drivers’ hands.
A couple months after finishing a draft of the poem, the roads underwent another change. After eleven pedestrian fatalities in the first eight months of 2022, city workers reduced the number of lanes on Main Street from five to four. When they redrew the lines for those wider lanes, whether they knew it or not, they were recreating an error more than two hundred years old.