When I took my first basic scuba course in the winter of 1969-1970, one of the members of Aqua Knights of Hamilton, the training club, gave a talk about underwater photography. During that talk, he described and showed photos of a locomotive sitting on tracks — underwater! That image fascinated me. A locomotive underwater? How did it get there? Why is it still there? And more importantly, where is it?
When I moved to the Niagara area to attend Brock University, I joined the Brock Scuba Club and we often did dives at local quarries. It was at Sherkston Quarry that I discovered the locomotives, yes plural, were still resting on the tracks.The quarry is located on the north shore of Lake Erie between Fort Erie to the east and Port Colborne to the west.
It has an interesting history that, over the years, I investigated. John Shisler and his wife Susanna Lehn Shisler were married in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. They initially came to Buffalo, New York but then moved to Humberstone Township in the Niagara Peninsula. In 1816, they purchased land from Benjamin Cutler. The land was part of Lot 6 in the First Concession and was located on the shore of Lake Erie. Locally, it became know as Shisler’s Point.
Their son Abram, born at Humberstone in 1814, purchased 40 acres in Lot 5, Concession 1 from his brother Conrad. He later purchased an additional 70 acres from his father. In all, he had 300 acres on which he farmed. In addition to farming, Abram Shisler began a stone and limestone business. It eventually grew into a large operation.
Later, in 1886, he leased the operation to the Carroll brothers of Buffalo N.Y. Before the expiry of the lease, the brothers sold their interest in the Shisler Quarry to the Empire Limestone Company of Scranton, Ohio. In 1903, Abram Shisler’s heirs sold their interest in the property to the Empire Limestone Company.
Early photos of the operation show that it was quite large. The company employed 250 labourers at the quarry. A village was inhabited by several hundred people. This community was called Shisler’s Point and boasted a post office, a church and a custom house. The village had single family houses and about 50 tenement houses. These were largely company-owned. Immigrants from Hungary, Austria, Italy and Poland all worked alongside Canadians.
Stores, a blacksmith shop, locomotive houses, a dynamite house, kilns, a compressor house, crushers and barns for horses were all associated with the operation. At first, horses were used to pull the small box cars into which the limestone was loaded for transportation to the crushers. Later, the locomotives were used in the operation.
After being crushed on the east side of the quarry, the stone was loaded onto railcars for transportation to Buffalo, Niagara Falls and Welland. The Lackawanna Steel Plant, which later became the Bethlehem Steel Company, used the majority of the product from the quarry. Some of the stone was shipped by barge after being loaded from a pier which extended out into Lake Erie.
The operation continued through the First World War, but increasing freight rates started to make the stone operation unprofitable. The company was also being sued by Thomas Edison for building a crusher of his design that he had not been compensated for.
In 1917, the company abandoned operations and the pumps were shut off. Water quickly filled the quarry, submerging much of the old equipment used in the operation. Although one of the large Scranton pumps and some of the tracks were salvaged, much can be seen by divers, including two of the Vulcan Locomotives used in the quarry operation. The only thing above the water that is left of this mining community is a small cemetery.
The property has been used for recreational purposes for decades, and many of the older residents of the Niagara area and beyond will have spent time at the beaches on Lake Erie. Today, the property where the quarry is located is advertised as Sun Retreats Sherkston Shores, formerly known as Sherkston Shores Beach Resort, “southern Ontario's vacation destination on the beautiful sandy shores of Lake Erie". This sprawling RV resort now offers 560 acres of beautifully landscaped grounds with 4 km of sandy beachfront for family activities.”