The Canal Museum The Canal Museum The Canal Museum, formerly known as the "National Waterways Museum Stoke Bruerne" and "The Canal Museum at Stoke Bruerne", is a canal museum located next to the Grand Union Canal just south of the Blisworth Tunnel, near the village of Stoke Bruerne in Northamptonshire. It is about north of Milton Keynes and south of Northampton near junction 15 of the M1 motorway. The museum is housed in a restored corn mill at the top of a flight of canal locks, and is one of several museums and attractions operated by the Canal & River Trust, the successor
Paw Paw Tunnel expected completion date of July 1838. Lee Montgomery, a Methodist minister who had experience from building the canal tunnel for the Union Canal was awarded the contract on March 15, 1836. Construction on the tunnel began in 1836. Unfortunately for Montgomery, the Irish workers were not skilled at tunnel work, so he obtained English masons, English and Welsh miners, and some "Dutch" [i.e. German] labourers. More unfortunately, this caused ethnic tensions which exploded into violence in 1837 and 1838, specifically between the Irish and everyone else; rioters destroyed the tavern at Oldtown, burned shanties, and the like. There were more