By the early 1900s Brantford, Ontario was the third largest manufacturing centre for exported goods in all of Canada, after only Toronto and Montreal. Once known as the “Birmingham of Canada,” and the “Combine Capital,” Brantford’s reputation as a “City of Industry” was driven by a host of industries, especially agricultural implements. Until the 1980s Brantford was a booming industrial city, boasting the highest paid factory wages in Ontario, including the auto industry.
But by the end of 1988 Brantford had lost two of its most significant industries, and unemployment in the city sky-rocketed to 24%. Throughout the 1990s Brantford suffered the effects of industrial decline and decay. Over 88 acres within the city were now abandoned and contaminated post-industrial sites or brownfields.
The Greenwich Mohawk site represents this history, from booming industrial hub to abandoned contaminated factory site. At 52 acres it is the largest of Brantford’s brownfields. For twenty-five years the Greenwich-Mohawk brownfield has loomed large in the community’s conscience as a horrible memory of Brantford’s industrial decay, and as a symbol of Brantford’s current problems and difficulties in moving forward. In many ways the Greenwich Mohawk site represents the intersections between industrial history and environmental history, and how both shape a community’s understanding and appreciation of its own past and its current self-image. Continue reading
