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Gilberts: This Dresden story deserves to be better known

The province created the Ontario Water Resources Commission, which began to regulate and provide financial help to develop things like water treatment plants.

I was born in 1957, at the height of the baby boom. In those days, babies weren’t the only thing that was booming. Canada had by then recovered from the dark days of depression and war and was moving full-throttle toward the modern lifestyle we enjoy today (some might say at our peril). Governments throughout the developed world were beginning to build the modern social safety net that is still in place, albeit not without holes, today.

One marker of that modern welfare state was safe, reliable drinking water. To that end, the province created the Ontario Water Resources Commission, which began to regulate and provide financial help to develop things like water treatment plants. Dresden was one of the first towns to receive funding to build a facility like that.

Gilberts: This Dresden story deserves to be better known Back to video

To that end, the Canadian-British Consulting Engineers firm was hired to design a plant and pumping station. During construction phase, which began in summer 1957, that company sent a young engineer, a recent British immigrant named Keith Philpott, to Dresden to supervise and ensure the design was followed properly during construction.

The first part of the design to be built was the pumping station. It was located on the bank of the Sydenham River, from which water would be extracted. Digging began in early August and almost immediately Philpott noticed problems. He voiced his concerns to the contractor, Keillor Construction of St. Thomas, and his superiors.

Philpott worried that the hole, dug straight down to a depth of 11 metres (35 feet), was unsafe in any soil, but especially near the river. Mostly, his concerns were brushed aside, even after several small cave-ins. Men beginning to install forms for the concrete foundations of the pumping station at the bottom of the hole were, in his opinion, at risk.

Those workers were recent immigrants from the Netherlands. They were part of a wave of Dutch families who arrived in Canada from that still wartorn country, mainly in the early 1950s, seeking new opportunities. Keillor had hired a number of Dutch-Canadian men from the Aylmer area. Their foreman, Dirk Ryksen, also a Dutch immigrant, was from Byron.

Two weeks into the construction project, Keith Philpott’s worst fears were realized.  Late in the afternoon of Aug. 14, 1957, there was a massive cave-in at the hole and six men were buried alive. Folks from Dresden rushed to the site and began frantically digging to try to rescue them, but the soil was just too heavy and dense. It wasn’t until two days later that all six bodies were recovered.

The news media showed up immediately, once they were notified and the story was front page news, as it should be. Six deaths due to an industrial accident was horrific and even today it remains one of the worst such incidents in Ontario history. But it is a story that is almost unknown. I worked in Dresden for many years and never heard about it.

Perhaps it’s because the six men – Enne Hovius and his son, Wilfred, Henrik Drenth, Jan Bremer, Jan Oldewening and foreman Ryksen – were recent immigrants. One would hope not, but the outsider, the newcomer and the person who looks and speaks a little differently has always had a tough go, even in a so-called “multicultural” country like ours.

The reason I do know this story and why it has come to light again, is because of engineer Philpott’s filmmaker  son, Eric.

His father never spoke to him about the incident, but Eric found his father’s diary in 2020 and decided to make a documentary about it. He and other folks associated with this endeavour have created a website, dresden1957,  to promote the story and their crowdfunding effort. They are less than $5,000 from their $60,000 goal. I hope you will consider helping them shine a light on this untold tragic story.

The Gilberts are award-winning historians with a passion for telling the stories of Chatham-Kent’s fascinating past

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