1925 Kennard Thomson Manuscript Map of Tidal Barrages on the Bay of Fundy

A unique historical survival, this 1925 manuscript planning map of proposed tidal barrages on the Bay of Fundy was drawn by American engineer Thomas Kennard Thomson for the Maple Leaf Canadian Club of New York.

A Closer Look

The map highlights the Bay of Fundy between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, displaying two proposed dam projects, one consisting of five dams on the border of Maine and New Brunswick at Passamaquoddy Bay and another composed of three dams at Hopewell Cape on Chignecto Bay.

Historical Context

The Bay of Fundy is well-known for its active and dramatic tides, with Passamaquoddy Bay constituting the largest tidal whirlpool in the Western Hemisphere and being home to some of the highest tides in the world. Since the early 20th century, engineers have imagined that these tides could be utilized to generate hydroelectric power. In the 1920s, two proposals gained considerable interest from the American and Canadian engineering community, one by New York engineer Dexter P. Cooper to build five dams (later expanded to seven) on either side of the U.S. - Canada border at Passamaquoddy Bay and another by Canadian engineer Wallace Rupert Turnbull for three dams at Hopewell.

Thomas Kennard Thomson, who drew this map, was an American civil engineer with a penchant for ambitious projects (see other maps of his listed by us, including a proposal to replace New York City's subways with multitiered elevated roadways and to create badly-needed land in the city by filling in the East River). Though the projects outlined here were not his own, Thomson expressed interest in them but ultimately deemed them too expensive to warrant construction.

Although funds were committed to both Cooper and Turnbull's projects by their respective governments for surveying and preparatory work, the former gained significantly more traction, in large part due to the political support of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who owned a summer home on nearby Campobello Island (helpfully, he was a neighbor of Cooper's mother-in-law). Nonetheless, private financing was never sufficient to begin work on the project. When Roosevelt became president, he continued to champion the idea of tidal dams at Passamaquoddy Bay despite skepticism from government officials and engineers that such a project would be cost-effective.

In 1935, Roosevelt allocated $7 million from the Public Works Administration budget for the Passamaquoddy Bay Tidal Power Project. Construction began on July 4 that year in Eastport and Lubec, Maine, with the Army Corps of Engineers building a complete town for the thousands of workers expected to work on the dams. Bulldozers and dynamite began moving earth in preparation for building the dams. However, opposition in Congress, where many saw the project (with some justification) as a boondoggle, soon led to its funding being cut off. The workers' housing was repurposed by the Navy as a training facility during the Second World War, but otherwise, nothing else remained of the Passamaquoddy Bay Tidal Power Project. In the years since, other engineers have continued to imagine that tidal power stations could be established at Passamaquoddy and Chignecto Bays but have had trouble finding a construction method that would justify the costs against the marginal benefits provided to such sparsely inhabited areas, especially given the lower cost of alternative means of power generation.

Publication History and Census

This manuscript map was drawn by Thomas Kennard Thomson for the Maple Leaf Canadian Club of New York in 1925. As a manuscript map, it is an entirely unique production.