The Tunnels of Halifax

The story says a tunnel runs from the Citadel down under the harbour to Georges Island. In a straight line that is 1.81 km (1.12 miles), measured between the province's official name points for the two.

It is an old story, and it has been answered for as long as it has been told. Harry Piers's history of the Halifax fortress, printed in 1947, seven years after his death, says there is no passage for men from the Citadel to the harbour or to the island. In 1973 the Mail-Star called the legend a persistent fairy tale. In 2013 Parks Canada said a survey of the harbour floor showed no evidence of a tunnel, and in 2023 the Geological Survey of Canada listed it among the myths of Halifax Harbour.

What Piers did find under the Citadel's glacis was a large, carefully built brick sewer that a man could pass through by stooping.

Halifax Public Libraries (the Mail-Star, 1973); Piers (1947), p. 42 note 6; Parks Canada's Hal Thompson to CTV Atlantic (2013); the Geological Survey of Canada, Open File 8945 (2023). The distance: GeoNAMES points for the Citadel and Georges Island.

Halifax Public Libraries keeps a list of underground finds downtown. It runs from 1919 to 1995, and most of it gives a year and a street, not a place.

The two best told are close together. In 1973 the road at the bottom of George Street caved in over a tunnel; a city inspector followed it as far as Hollis Street, and reporter Barbara Hinds went in. In 1976 a Nova Scotia Power crew replacing a pole on Prince Street broke into a passage.

Under the Halifax Club on Hollis Street a trapdoor opens on a passage about 50 ft (15 m) long, believed built with the building around 1861. In 2015 archaeologist Laura de Boer and Halifax Water sent a camera rover under Duke Street and found no older construction. In June 2017 a hole on Argyle Street went viral as a tunnel: it was a brick manhole over a 24-inch (61 cm) clay sewer pipe.

Halifax Public Libraries, "The Tunnels of Halifax – Fact and Fiction" (2022); CBC News (2017). The Duke Street camera rests on the library's account alone.

On 7 February 1866 the city engineer, John Kelly, reported to City Council on the sewers. Those in Sackville, Prince, George, Duke and Buckingham streets, he wrote, carry the water directly down the hill. They are the streets the finds keep turning up on.

Some were in bad shape. On Prince Street, from Bedford Row to the Water Street outlet, the side walls were gone for some distance, and nothing but the arch was holding up the street.

The library's own account comes to the same place. Archaeologist Laura de Boer says the larger tunnels under the downtown streets are what remains of the old sewer system; when a walled-off section was opened it held 19th- and 20th-century pipes.

John Kelly, Report on Halifax Sewerage (1866), Internet Archive, CIHM 63443; Halifax Public Libraries (2022). The streets match by name: no survey has traced each find to a sewer.

Halifax does have military tunnels. Inside the Citadel's counterscarp wall, the outer wall of the ditch, runs a vaulted gallery about 3,500 ft (1,070 m) long, begun in 1829 to 1832 and completed in 1838 to 1849. From it, T-shaped countermines run out under the glacis, where charges could be fired under an attacker standing above. The gallery's loopholes covered the ditch.

Fifteen of the countermines have collapsed or partly collapsed, and one engineer cut half of the planned countermines in the 1830s. Both points rest on one source, the federal heritage statement for the gallery.

On Georges Island, Fort Charlotte's main magazine and tunnel complex was built from 1865 to 1867: a maze of brick ammunition tunnels under the centre of the island. Parks Canada runs guided tours of them while the island is open, from June to October.

And the hatch on Citadel Hill opens on an 83 m (272 ft) Parks Canada utility tunnel, not a secret passage (CBC News, 2016; one source).

Parks Canada, Federal Heritage Buildings Review Office, statement 95-01 (1995); Canada's Historic Places, Main Magazine and Tunnel Complex; Parks Canada, Georges Island tunnel tours.

When Halifax was founded in 1749, today's waterfront property was part of the harbour. The shore ran about where Water Street runs now, and Water Street began as a path along the beach.

In 1759 the governor's council let a wharf or breastwork be built out from the shore, 169 ft (52 m) along it. Wharves went out, and the water between them was filled. As late as 1803 part of one waterfront site was still open water; its owners filled it within a few years. At the south end the Ocean Terminals were built from 1912 to 1928, partly on rock from the new railway cut.

On the live map, a beige dash-dot line marks the original shore and a hatch marks the land filled since: about 76 ha (188 acres) on the Halifax side. The line is an estimate, good to about 50 m along the harbour, from Des Barres's chart of 1779 and Harris's plan of 1749 fitted to today's map.

Tom Tulloch, Halifax Military Heritage Preservation Society (2019); Susan Buggey, Halifax Waterfront Buildings, Parks Canada (the 1759 wharf and the 1803 site rest on her report alone); Canadian Society for Civil Engineering, Ocean Terminals. The method is on the data page.