They didn’t need to stop and unload in Collingwood. Then, while the world was recovering, the Welland Canal opened (1932) and ships could sail directly from Port Arthur (now part of Thunder Bay) through to Lake Ontario.
1929, the Great Depression brought most commercial business to a standstill. The railway line ran to the terminals and could hold 70 cars at a time. It was built on 125,000 wooden piles – using 700,000 feet of timber and 26,500 barrels of cement, plus another 695,000 feet of timber for the concrete forms used to build the structure above. It stands 100 feet tall (183 feet at the top of the superstructure), is 350 feet long, and has 95 bins (55 large, 25 smaller ‘star’ bins and 18 half-stars) inside to hold the grain. (I’ve got pictures of the first and third, but not the second – although I have seen an early photo showing two elevators on the waterfront together).īuilt in 1929, the existing elevators heralded a new era for Collingwood as the terminus of a great transportation network that brought grain from Canada’s western provinces to be distributed here to the eastern half of Canada and, once reaching the east coast ports, overseas.
The first three were wooden the first one was built in 1855 and burned in 1862, the second was built in 1871 and also burned down (date unknown) the replacement third was demolished in 1937. Everyone recognizes the Collingwood terminals, one of the iconic (albeit unused) grain elevators on the Great Lakes, but it is actually the fourth on our waterfront.
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