04/18/2026
🫣 Hundreds of people watched nervously as a man the locals knew only as someone who painted houses stepped out onto a wire stretched 400 feet across the gorge at Grand Falls on August 12th, 1904. Below him were raging waterfalls and sharp boulders. A fall meant certain death.
The man on the wire was Joseph Van Morrell. As far as most people in Grand Falls knew, Van (as everyone called him) had always painted houses. That had been his job since he moved to the town some 14 years earlier from Maine.
But, unbeknownst to the locals, Van had once been a prodigy on the high wire.
Through his teens, he'd toured The Maritimes, New England, and Coney Island, with a circus. His signature act was riding a bicycle across a tightrope high above the ground.
Then, in 1890, he retired from the circus life, settled down, and developed a passion for painting homes. (That wasn't sarcasm; he was indeed very passionate about paint, inventing secret paint mixes and developing new forms of paintbrushes.)
Nobody is entirely sure what convinced him to come out of retirement for this.
Grand Falls that weekend was already drawing thousands of visitors for its annual harness races. Van had approached the organizers and made his case: being the first person to ever cross the Falls on a tightrope would bring in even bigger crowds. They agreed. He drove metal bars deep into the rock on either side of the gorge to anchor his wire. Those bars are said to still be there today.
At 2:30 in the afternoon, with the sky overcast, Van stepped out onto the wire. Then he abruptly turned around and came back.
The crowd assumed he'd lost his nerve.
He hadn't.
The sun was in his eyes.
He went to the other side and tried again.
Halfway across, his knees began to buckle. His body swayed. He bent down, laid his balancing pole across the wire, and rose into a handstand.
For twenty minutes, the man the locals knew only as a man who pained houses entertained the crowd with acrobatic stunts above the falls, before finally crossing to the other side.
Then he went back to painting houses.
📰 Find the full article here: backyardhistory.ca/articles/f/tightrope-walking-over-grand-falls
📕 Find many more forgotten stories from The Maritimes in the four Backyard History books! Get 'em at backyardhistory.ca/books
