Jim Clifford and Stéphane Castonguay will lead a walking tour on Sunday June 16 at 7pm starting at Victoria Square in Montreal.
Towers of Grain: Feeding Edwardian Britain
Silo number 1, built in 1902 in the Port of Montreal, linked the burgeoning wheat farms on the Prairies with the urban markets in the United Kingdom. New industrial-scale flour mills were built in Birkenhead near Liverpool and West Ham on the eastern edge of London between 1899 and 1905. On the Prairies, Ogilvie Milling Company, the British American Company, Grain Growers’ Grain Company and others built thousands of grain elevators to feed wheat into the railways. Railways and steamships linked these towers together. Settlers and farming in the Canadian Prairies required industrial technology from the start, and this provides an important reminder the Industrial Revolution did not stop at the city limits of Manchester, Glasgow, or Montreal. This walking tour will use digital materials to explore the transnational history of the grain silos in the Port of Montreal and Prairie wheat fields.
The tour will commence 7:00pm at the Art Nouveau entrance of the Square-Victoria–OACI metro station.
Please register for the free walking tour on Eventbrite.
Here is the current draft of the digital content developed to accompany the walking tour:
Great story which reminded me of working alongside the River Thames upstream from the docks around 1962 ! Before migrating to Canada I worked in four historic buildings and probably never appreciated them fully.