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Introduction: Waterpower, the Lachine Canal, and the Industrial Development of Montreal
Terry S. Reynolds
This special issue of IA evolved from The Society for Industrial Archeology's annual meeting at Montreal, 29 May to 1 June 2003. At that meeting, several sessions focused on issues of industrial power and the role of the Lachine Canal and waterpower in the development of Montreal's industrial landscape. This issue collects four of those papers.
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The history of the use of industrial power at Montreal provides a microcosm of the history of power use for Canada as a whole. Moreover, as Canada's leading industrial city during the late-19th and early-20th centuries, Montreal also provides an excellent case study of what factors encouraged the growth of Canadian industrial complexes and what factors prompted changes in motive power in Canadian industry.
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For centuries the preferred mode of power for industrial use in Canada was water. Already by 1688 French Canada had 44 water-powered gristmills, a number that would grow to around 120 by 1739.1 On the island of Montreal, Francois Dollier de Casson constructed one of Canada's earliest canals in 1689 to supply water to mills at Montreal.2
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When French rule was succeeded by British in 1763, Canadian industry continued to depend on waterpower, and its development often paralleled developments further south in the United States. For example, the water-powered complex developed along the Lachine Canal at Montreal between 1845 and 1860 resembled the American water-powered complexes erected at places like Lowell and Lawrence in Massachusetts between 1820 and 1850.3
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The Lachine Canal was the key fixture in Montreal's early industrial landscape. Initially constructed between 1821 and 1825 to bypass the Lachine Rapids of the St. Lawrence River and better open the Canadian interior to waterborne transportation, the Lachine Canal was enlarged twice in subsequent years. Although constructed initially as part of the Canadian response to the Erie Canal, the Lachine evolved to become more than simply a transportation corridor. After the Board of Public Works of the United Canadas authorized the lease of waterpower sites adjacent to the canal in conjunction with its first significant enlargement in the mid-1840s, the Lachine quickly became a magnet for Canadian industry. The Lachine's combination of waterpower, ready access to economical transportation, and location at a leading point for the trans-shipment of goods resulted in the emergence of the most important industrial concentration in Canada for most of a century.
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The opening paper in this volume provides an overview of the importance of the Lachine Canal complex to Montreal's and Canada's industrial development. As author Yvon Desloges points out, at one time or another 600 to 800 different companies from all sectors of Canadian industry have located on the Lachine's shores. Desloges demonstrates that the Lachine served as a magnet for industry, not only because of its combined role as power provider, transportation facilitator, and industrial water supply but also because the industries located on its banks were often mutually interdependent—purchasing goods and services from each other, thus avoiding warehousing as well as attracting other industries to the vicinity.
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The Lachine was not the only Canadian navigation canal to use excess water to power mills. Other Canadian navigation canals did the same. Pauline Desjardins's paper investigates the navigation canals on the St. Lawrence River and the Niagara escarpment that leased surplus water for power generation in the 19th century. She describes lease provisions, the physical layouts used to direct water from the canals to adjacent mills, and the canals' success in attracting industry. Not surprisingly, the Lachine's achievement in drawing industry to Montreal was extraordinary, but Desjardins finds that some of the other canals, as at Valleyfield and St. Catharines, had success as well, even if on a smaller scale. Moreover, by 1880 the demand for water by canal-side factories and mills greatly exceeded original lease specifications. Many mills responded in two ways: by deliberately drawing more water into their wheels than lease specifications allowed while simultaneously seeking to conserve the water available by installing more efficient water engines. Desjardins uses surviving data to trace the transition from traditional waterwheels to more efficient turbines in Canada's canal-side, water-powered industrial plants.
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Montreal's favorable location with respect to waterpower was exploited by industry and by the city itself as Susan Ross's paper demonstrates. In the early 1850s, when the city sought to enlarge and expand its water supply, the city hired one of Canada's best-known engineers, William Keefer, to investigate alternatives. After reviewing the comparative advantages of steam and waterpower, Keefer recommended construction of a dual-purpose canal, one that would bring fresh water from the St. Lawrence upstream and use that water not only for drinking and fire control but also as a source of power for its pumps. Drawing on American precedents, Keefer rejected the advice of British engineers that Montreal's system be steam powered. Ross describes the water-powered water supply system that Keefer designed. She also analyzes both why Keefer recommended waterpower over steam power and why his recommendations gained acceptance, even though steam had begun to replace water as a source of power in many arenas.
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Montreal's success in solving its water problems and in enticing industries carried with it the seeds of the demise of direct-drive waterpower that had initially attracted industry to the Lachine Canal. Indeed, within a few years of the installation of Keefer's water-powered waterworks, more industries had located in the southwestern portion of the island of Montreal than the Lachine Canal could service. As a result, Montreal industries slowly turned to steam for motive power, even those located along the canal. By 1900 steam engines generated around 60 percent of the industrial power in use in the Lachine Canal industrial corridor, and dependence on steam had grown to the point where Montrealers referred to the area as "smoky valley."4 Surprisingly, steam's reign as the primary source of motive power for Montreal's industries was short lived, roughly from 1880 to 1920. The emergence of electricity as a convenient form of power transmission—replacing belts, gears, and shafts—laid the foundation for the re-emergence of waterpower, in the form of hydroelectricity, as the corridor's chief source of power in the early-20th century.
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Between 1895 and 1920, Canadian industry gradually made the transition from steam power to hydroelectricity.5 The greatest drawback to early hydroelectric distribution systems was their use of direct current, which limited transmission distances. However, by 1910 Ontario Hydro was using alternating current to transmit power 88 miles from Niagara Falls and had developed a system of transmission lines that covered 250 miles and operated at 110kV.6 The key missing ingredient, interconnection of disparate transmission lines and plants to increase the reliability and capacity of electrical networks, emerged after World War I disclosed the shortcomings of small capacity, independent, hydroelectric generating and transmission systems.7 By 1945 water-powered hydroelectric plants generated 94 percent of Canadian electric power.8
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The last paper in this special issue discusses the transition from waterpower to steam power and then back to waterpower, in the form of hydroelectricity, focusing on Montreal and the Lachine Canal. Alain Gelly argues that the transition from steam to hydroelectricity was initially slow because steam-powered plants had a number of innate advantages over early electric-powered systems, including experience, reliability, and cost. Even when some industries began to use electricity, they often generated it with their own steam engines to avoid dependence on external agencies, particularly Montreal Light, Heat and Power Company. The key factor in turning the tide, Gelly argues, was not the technical superiority of electricity as a mode of power or of power transmission but was the impact of World War I on Montreal's coal supplies. The war resulted in higher coal prices and the need to rely on American coal brought in by rail. Higher coal prices provided the impetus for Montreal-area industrial plants to begin to shift away from steam and towards electricity, particularly hydroelectricity, for industrial power. When coal prices continued to be high after the war, the transition from steam to hydroelectricity that had begun during the war accelerated.
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Montreal was Canada's leading industrial center for the century, running from approximately 1850 to 1950. The four articles contained in this volume provide insights into the role of waterpower and the Lachine Canal in the rise of Montreal as a manufacturing hub, the nature of the industrial district that grew up around the Lachine Canal, and the factors behind the power preferences of the industries that operated there. Together, the articles make an important contribution to knowledge of Canada's industrial heritage.
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Acknowledgements
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| My thanks to Louise Trottier, the authors, and the referees for their contributions in making this special issue of IA possible. |
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Notes
1. Richard C. Harris, The Seigneurial System in Early Canada (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 72–73, 75.
2. Pauline Desjardins, "From the Warehouses to the Canal by Rail ca. 1830: The Lachine Canal, Montreal, Quebec," Northeast Historical Archaeology 28 (1999): 58.
3. For American water-powered complexes, see Louis C. Hunter, A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780–1930, vol. 1 of Waterpower in the Century of the Steam Engine (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia for the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation, 1979), 204–291. For the Lachine, see the papers by Desloges and Desjardins in this volume and Larry McNally, "Water Power on the Lachine Canal 1846–1900," Ottawa, Parks Canada, Microfiche Report Series 54, 1982.
4. For a recent account of the emergence of industry in Montreal, see Robert Lewis, Manufacturing Montreal: The Making of an Industrial Landscape 1850 to 1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2000).
5. Among the works devoted to the development of hydroelectricity in Canada are Charles H. Mitchell, Canadian Hydraulic Power Development and Electric Power in Canadian Industry (Ottawa: J. de L. Taché, 1916); Merrill Denison, The People's Power: The History of Ontario Hydro (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1960); H. V. Nelles, The Politics of Development: Forests, Mines, & Hydro-Electric Power in Ontario, 1849–1941 ([Hamden, Conn.]: Archon Books, 1974); J. H. Dales, Hydroelectricity and Industrial Development: Quebec, 1898–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957); Clinton O. White, Power for a Province: A History of Saskatchewan Power (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, Univ. of Regina, 1976); and Karl Froschauer, White Gold: Hydroelectric Power in Canada (Vancouver: Univ. of British Columbia Press, 1999).
6. J. E. Sproule, "Transmission Lines from Canadian Niaga--ra Developments," Engineering Journal 37, no. 8 (1954): 940; G. G. Gale, "Hydro-Electric Industry in Canada," Engineering Journal 13, no. 7 (1930): 446.
7. F. R. Benedict, "Development of Transmission and Distribution Systems," Westinghouse Engineer 10, no. 1 (1956): 63.
8. Today the figure is around 60 percent <http://atlas.gc.ca/site/english/maps/economic/generatingstations/allbyfuel/1>.
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