A business fad in Ontario during the years before and after 1900 was the pork packing factory.
Small towns, desiring to build their local economies, gladly embraced the chance to start a new industry. Local investors were persuaded to invest in those operations, and invariably they were disappointed.
Wellington County acquired three such pork packing plants during that period, in Harriston, Palmerston and Fergus. There were dozens more in small towns across Ontario, and indeed, elsewhere in North America.
All those plants planned to use modern methods to process and ship pork to British and continental European markets. By concentrating on handling hogs only, and processing them in custom-built plants, they hoped to achieve operating efficiencies. The pork would be shipped to east-coast ports in refrigerated rail cars, and then to their destinations aboard refrigerated ships.
The processing and shipping system would put fresh pork on the tables of Europe, rather than the salt pork and smoked ham that had been on the market there for decades.
This system promised a new and vital industry for small towns, and a new product niche for farmers to exploit. The idea was a sound one – in principle. The flaw was that the capacity of all those new plants far exceeded market demand. There were not enough hogs raised in Ontario to keep all the new factories humming. And on the other side there was too much pork on the export market to buy the output of all the new processing plants. It is no surprise that the whole industry soon crashed.
Typically, local businessmen organized the companies, buying shares themselves, and selling more to the local farmers who would be the suppliers of the hogs processed by the plant.
The operation organized at Harriston in 1898 was typical of those formed during the period. The directors included John Meiklejohn, perhaps the leading Harriston businessman of the period, and Aaron Wenger, with business interests in the town. Familiar names such as J.W. Wilson, William Hinde, and W.D. McLellan sat on the board of directors. The first board was elected at a general meeting in August 1898. The company had been organized with an authorized capital of $100,000, divided into $100 shares. Agents scoured Harriston, Minto and the adjoining townships, and had some success selling shares to farmers and town residents.
The organizers worked closely with a firm in Chicago, William S. Perrin and Company, which supplied designs for the plants and sold processing and refrigeration equipment. That firm did such a large business in Ontario that it organized a subsidiary firm based in Toronto.
The operation planned for Harriston was a large one by the standards of small town processing plants. The main building was to be 80 feet by 96 feet, three storeys in height, with a full basement. That building would include chilling rooms, refrigerated storage, curing cellars, a shipping room, and the offices for the operation. An annex building, 48 by 80 feet, was to contain the killing room, tanks for the storage of lard, a boiler, and a steam engine to provide power for the refrigeration equipment, and machinery to convert waste and scrap into fertilizer.
Loading facilities would permit hogs to arrive by rail and pork to leave in refrigerated railway cars. The directors issued glowing reports regarding share subscriptions, but the real figures reflected a different story. After an aggressive subscription campaign only $36,000 of shares were taken, and of that total only 70% was paid in to the company.
Nevertheless, the directors succeeded in building the plant during 1899, largely according to the original plans, but part of the front portion rose to four storeys rather than three. At the end of the year the company had a huge pile of unpaid bills, and needed further working capital to begin operations.
A British importer, Heywood & Son, agreed to handle the products of the company on the British market. That company also agreed to put $10,000 into the firm when local investors had taken $55,000 of the shares, but those sales were far short of that mark.
The directors appealed to Harriston council for help. After some negotiation, councillors agreed to loan the company $20,000 at four per cent interest, repayable over 20 years. As well, the town would pay the former owner of the land on which the plant was built the sum of $495. He had never been paid for that land. The plant would be exempt from municipal taxes for the term of then loan.
As was necessary in those days, the bylaw authorizing the loan had to be submitted to the ratepayers for approval. Harriston’s property owners did so on Nov. 7, 1899, with only 22 people dissenting.
The injection of municipal funds permitted the plant to begin production early in 1900. The loan from the municipality also spurred sales of stock in the early months of 1900. A number of farmers became shareholders by paying for their stock in hogs. The list of shareholders eventually topped the 500 mark, the vast majority holding only one or two shares.
The plant processed significant numbers of hogs during 1900, with a payroll that at times topped the 50 mark. However, the flow of hogs was somewhat sporadic, and there were problems holding on to skilled employees as volumes fluctuated widely. Managers talked most employees into taking some of their wages in pork, which they could consume at the family table or barter with storekeepers or neighbours for other items.
Faced with ever increasing competition, the plant limped along for five years, operating nowhere near capacity and generating red ink in the ledgers most of those years. A crunch came in 1905; accounts reached the intolerable level, suppliers would extend no further credit, and the business was unable to meet its loan payment to the town. Shareholders never saw a cent of dividends.
The Davies Packing Company, a rapidly expanding conglomerate, purchased the assets of the business in 1905. Davies had been buying up a lot of the smaller packing plants in Ontario. In many cases, the big firm shut them down in order to remove a nuisance to itself in the marketplace. In the case of Harriston, though, Davies continued to operate, and expanded production above the levels of the plant’s independent years.
With the outbreak of war in 1914, Davies secured a contract with the Canadian Expeditionary Force to supply canned pork and beans to the army. Davies re-equipped the Harriston plant to handle the contract. Employment rose with that new contract, and the plant began to hire women when men became scarce due to Armed Forces enlistments.
The pork-and-bean production line continued after the war, supplying export and domestic markets. Davies failed to capture a big domestic market share, and in the early 1920s the plant shut down. It was surplus to the needs of the Davies Company, and it remained vacant for six years.
Businessman George Walkey purchased the vacant property, and leased it to others for a variety of uses. Tenants over the years included Royal Sterling Products making brooms, Monarch Clothing, and Model Spinning Mills, which closed down in 1955. The building remained vacant until 1968, when it was demolished. Share certificates of the Harriston Pork Packing Company are no doubt among the papers of many old families in Harriston and Minto, reminders of when the town had ambitions to be a strong and diverse manufacturing town.