The brown-painted floors of the Forbes Memorial Reading Room creaked and moaned each time Jane Whiteside Craig retrieved another binder of photographs from the bookcase.

Under cathedral ceilings, where a handful of quilts, a few tattered hockey jerseys and dozens more photographs hang from poles and walls, she turned page after page until she found the right one.

"This was my father's hotel," Craig said, tipping the binder on its edge and running her finger over the image.

"Our living quarters were here in the back. My father owned the hotel, and he was also on the committee to build the church, and he was on the School Board to build the school.

"He did everything he could. He wasn't college educated, but he wanted to help.

"I can't think of a time between '54 and '58 when he sat down with us," she said. "He was constantly on the move. He always had somewhere to go.

"But the most important thing to him was that people got fair compensation for their loss."

But as Craig got older, she learned that some losses can't be measured in dollars and cents.

VILLAGES MOVED

She was a 12-year-old schoolgirl in 1954 when word came that her small Ontario village of Moulinette would be flooded to redirect the St. Lawrence River and silence the raging Long Sault Rapids.

Moulinette was one of six Canadian communities to disappear on Inundation Day -- July 1, 1958 -- during construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the St. Lawrence-Franklin D. Roosevelt-Robert H. Saunders Power Project.

The international effort to tame the rapids and generate inexpensive hydroelectric power was completed in 47 months, using more than 5,700 American workers and 6,100 Canadians.

During construction, 6,500 people, 550 homes, 225 farms and 17 churches were moved from villages to two new communities created to house the displaced families.

Each new township would have schools, churches and parks built to replace lost property and amenities.

EXCITED AT FIRST