Sugar Loaf and Gravelly Bay: How Port Colborne's Harbour Began

Long before there was a town, there was Sugar Loaf — a distinctive rise of land on the Lake Erie shore that mariners used to find their way. For First Nations peoples, and later for French explorers and British sailors, the hill served as a natural navigation reference along an otherwise low and featureless stretch of coastline. The Niagara Falls Public Library's Historic Niagara archive holds early views of the spot, including images titled 'Sugar Loaf Point Port Colborne Canada' and 'The Sugar Loaf Home,' showing the sandy beach and scattered houses of the original shoreline community. Today the name survives in Sugar Loaf Point and the Sugarloaf Harbour Marina, but its real significance is far older: it marked the safe approach to one of the best natural harbours at the eastern end of Lake Erie, the harbour that would eventually anchor a canal town.

The settlement that grew beside that harbour was first known as Gravelly Bay, named for the stony shoreline, and dates to about 1832. Its fortunes changed when engineers chose it as the Lake Erie terminus of the First Welland Canal — the waterway that let ships bypass Niagara Falls and connect Lake Ontario with Lake Erie. When the southern end of that canal opened in 1833, the community was renamed Port Colborne in honour of Sir John Colborne, a British war hero who was then Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada. The new name signalled the town's new role: not just a fishing and farming bay, but a port. From that point the canal, the harbour, and the lake traffic that flowed through them would drive Port Colborne's growth — and bring the mills, grain elevators, and industry that followed.

Where the canal meets the lake stands Lock 8, one of the longest canal locks in the world and the reason ships can pass between the steady canal and the restless lake. Lock 8 is a guard, or control, lock: rather than lifting vessels a great height, it holds the canal's water level independent of Lake Erie's. That matters because Lake Erie is shallow and wind-driven — a strong, sustained wind can pile water up or drain it away, swinging the level at Port Colborne by as much as eleven feet. The lock lets ships enter the lake whatever its mood. Watching a laker glide through Lock 8, with the old harbour and Sugar Loaf in the background, ties together the whole story: a navigation landmark, a settlement renamed for a canal, and an engineering solution to the temper of the lake.