Casimir Gzowski

First chairman of the Niagara Parks Commission 

Casimir Gzowski was born in Russia to a minor aristocratic Polish family and was expected to become an officer in the Russian army. However, in the early 1830s Gzowski decided to join the rebellion against Russia’s political oppression in Poland–an act that would lead to his imprisonment in Austria. Gzowski left Europe for North America after completing his sentence, arriving in New York City in 1833. He moved to Ontario in 1842 and never left Canada.

Upon arriving in Ontario, then called Canada West, Gzowski was offered an engineering job with the roads and waterways public works department. Over the next 25 years he was involved in building railroads, bridges and other large-scale public infrastructure projects.

Gzowski is credited for engineering extensive sections of what would become the Canadian National Railway (CNR) and Toronto’s famed Yonge Street, as well as making key improvements to the Welland Canal system. Most notably, Gzowski engineered and built the International Railway Bridge that first connected Fort Erie, Ontario and Buffalo, New York in 1873. The bridge is still in use today.