‘It looked like a giant rib cage in the ground’: The centuries-old origins of Silicon Valley north laid bare by LRT build

Underneath the main thoroughfare in the Canadian city known as Silicon North, an old secret lay buried for 200 years.

Workers digging up the main drag in Waterloo, Ontario — a strip known locally as “UpTown” — uncovered in March a thoroughfare that dates the city’s earliest origins. It was a row of logs, 220 metres long, making up what was once a corduroy road.

Dated to the turn of the 19th century, the road was created by early Mennonite settlers who moved into the area from Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, after buying up large swaths of land from Richard Beasely, a “refugee loyalist” from the United States who fled north following the war of independence. He single-handedly bought up hundreds of thousands of acres along the Grand River from local Six Nations (who may not have fully understood the implications of the sale, given the indigenous populations’ rather different view of landownership).