Abandoned stone and brick culvert that appears to have been built originally to route Lavender Creek beneath the Grand Trunk Railway.
Graphic Equalizer
Lavender Creek and Grand Trunk Railway Drain
Water/Sewershed:
Lavender Creek (Rowntree's Creek)
Black Creek tributary
Year of Construction:
1853
Construction Details:
Concrete arched conduit at the outfall leads to a corrugated metal pipe half full of sediment. A hole in the wall (literally) provides access to an abandoned stone arch tunnel that may have once routed the Lavender Creek beneath the Grand Trunk Railroad line.
Lavender Creek is a tributary of the Black Creek that has been largely obliterated by residential and industrial development in the West Toronto Junction and neighbouring Silverthorn. The small stretch of the creek that remains is littered with trash, partly canalized, and largely ignored. It also must pass through this short drain, which carries it beneath the former Grand Trunk Railway corridor and Weston Road.
There are three periods of construction present in this drain. The first is a very old, stone block culvert that likely dates to 1853 and the original construction of the Toronto and Guelph Railroad, which two years later was bought and became the Toronto-Sarnia portion of the Grand Trunk Railway. This culvert was abandoned in the 1970s or 1980s, probably as a result of renewal work on the rail lines above it.
The bulk of the drain is an arched concrete tunnel likely installed c. 1890-1915. This tunnel runs from just east of Weston Road to the outlet where Lavender Creek daylights again into a canal that carries it W/NW to the Black Creek, and contains one short branch that leads to a drop shaft. The concrete tunnel may have once been connected with the stone culvert, but is now fed by a modern corrugated metal conduit that intersects the old culvert. A hole in the wall of the metal section provides access to one half of the culvert, from which point you can look and/or crawl over the metal pipe and into the other half of the culvert, though it contains fairly deep water.
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