Boom Times: The Steel Belt

Across the river, the Canadian peninsula was also seeing its most rapid growth after recovering from a post-Civil War slowdown caused in part by the demise of the Reciprocity Treaty.  American Byron J. McCormick masterminded Welland’s rise by organizing the Welland Realty Company, which played a hand in luring branch plants of important US firms like the Welland Plymouth Cordage Company (from Massachusetts) and a variety of forging, lumber, knitting, metalworking, and shipbuilding concerns.  In St. Catharines, coal powered industries like Warren Knitwear and the Welland Vale Manufacturing Company put their shoulders behind the region’s economic growth as well.  In 1898 the city built a hydro-electric power plant, the first east of the Rocky Mountains, which facilitated even wider industrial expansion by extending the reach of power from Niagara Falls.  Some of this Canadian growth, ironically, had been an unintentional result of high tariffs during the 1890s, which spurred American companies to expand onto Canadian soil to maintain their traditional trading patterns across the Niagara ­ an unlikely and unlooked-for benefit of the “borderland economy”!

Just as the canal era had been powered by the muscle of immigrants, so this industrial era relied on a seemingly endless stream of European migrants.  Most poured into the American side, to Buffalo, adding the distinctive flavor of eastern and southern Europe ­ Italians, Poles, and Jews ­ to the city’s ethnic mosaic.  After the turn of the century the Canadian side, too, witnessed an influx of immigrants, the first time in the overwhelmingly British peninsula that a substantial number of residents were non-English speakers.  Once again, the Niagara Frontier was reaping the benefits of its role as a middle ground ­ a place where the Old World and new met through immigration; where the North American heartland linked up to the eastern seaboard; where raw materials were transformed on their way to market; and where waterways, railroads, and communications lines intersected at the nexus of a great web of connections.  But this role had not come easily.  The region had grown into it through active efforts to create, nurture, and sustain an infrastructure that capitalized on natural advantages.

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