Wellington County, along with adjoining jurisdictions, has a number of large swamps containing significant deposits of peat.
From time to time various entrepreneurs have regarded those deposits as a source of fuel for industry and home heating. Some of those schemes have been featured in this column over the years.
Interest in peat generally peaked when there were supply problems with coal imported from the United States. Tight supplies periodically forced the price upward. As well, strikes by the United Mine Workers disrupted supplies several times.
The largest of the swamps containing significant quantities of peat are in the north of Wellington, particularly in West Luther Township and the eastern portion of Arthur Township. In 1899, W.L. Smith, a businessman from Mount Forest, began to investigate the potential of peat as a fuel, and the ways that it could be harvested, processed, and marketed.
Smith was inspired by a new operation near Stratford, where a company was harvesting peat, pressing it into bricks by machine, and drying the product for sale to homeowners in the Stratford area. Smith believed the peat in Normanby and Arthur Townships was superior to that at Stratford.
After spending some time investigating the various swamps in the Mount Forest area, he settled on one farm in Normanby and three in Arthur. All offered ample deposits of what seemed like good quality peat, and all were close to roads for easy transportation.
In early April of 1900 Smith sent some samples of the peat from those sites to the Milton Brick Works. He wanted to see whether the brick pressing machines there could press the peat into bricks that could be dried and that would not crumble during handling. He believed it would be more cost effective to use commercially-available brick presses rather than develop and custom-build machines such as that in use near Stratford.
That spring, peat fuel sold in Stratford at $4.50 a ton. Smith considered that a high price, accounted for by the novelty of the product, the small volume of production at the local plant, and a spike in the cost of coal and wood for fuel. His plan was to have his own product on the Mount Forest market for the heating season of 1900-01, and at a lower price.
To test the public response to the new product, Smith had, earlier in the year, brought in a carload of peat from Stratford. Several citizens volunteered to test it during the winter. No one who burned peat that winter was completely disappointed in the product, but many had reservations. Some believed it burned too quickly, wasting heat up their chimneys, which would make its effective cost higher than coal. Others were unhappy to get up during the night to stoke their furnaces. A fire of hard anthracite coal would last through the night without refueling.
Smith was not the only entrepreneur investigating and experimenting with peat that winter. The weekly Monetary Times, the leading business newspaper of the day, published an article in April 1900 that attributed the sudden interest in peat to the spike in the price of coal. The article noted the seemingly inexhaustible supply in the northern areas of much of Canada. As well, patriots embraced peat fuel, arguing that it kept money in Canada, rather than sending it to evil American coal producers.
The article described a producer near Orillia. A customer of that operation answered the objection that the fuel burned too fast. He stated that a peat fire needed to be dampered down until the fire glowed rather than burned. In his furnace he allowed air to enter only at the front of the fire, and only in sufficient quantity to carry the smoke up the chimney. With this method, he stated, a peat fire would last 12 hours.
Using the new fuel in kitchen cook stoves presented more of a problem. Most users, apparently, were not satisfied with its use as a cooking fuel. It seemed to be difficult to control the fire in a cook stove.
A significant problem was the bricks themselves. They broke and crumbled easily. Some authorities claimed it was impossible to press peat into solid blocks. According to one critic, the British government had, in 1850, offered a large award to anyone who could develop a machine to press peat into solid blocks. A half century later, no one had developed a method to answer the requirements for the prize. Later, someone knowledgeable on the subject pointed out that the prize had been withdrawn in 1855.
There were other criticisms of the new local fuel. Some argued that the pressure and heat needed to press the peat destroyed much of the heating potential in the fuel. Others feared that the dense smoke and its smell would make the air in towns and villages hideous, if not dangerous, and equal to the poorest areas of Ireland, where peat was the standard fuel.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, there were strong feelings in opposition to peat fuel. There was no doubt that a ton of peat yielded less heat than a ton of anthracite coal, but the ratio was not clear and was disputed fiercely. Some critics of peat stated that peat would need to be priced close to a dollar a ton to compete with coal at $4.50 per ton.
Neither W.L. Smith or other peat producers of the 1900-era said much about their production costs. Using the technology of the time those could be considerable. Swamps containing the peat had to be drained prior to harvesting.
That involved dams and pumping. After harvesting the peat, whether in blocks or loose format, drying and pressing the peat required significant amounts of energy.
The efforts of W.L. Smith and others to capitalize on local peat bogs continued for a few more years. In the end he failed to establish a viable business. No doubt a fall in the price of coal was a factor, though that fuel continued to fluctuate wildly in price during the following decade. Perhaps another factor was the fact that most people did not have furnaces and stoves that could be dampered down sufficiently to burn peat efficiently.
There were further attempts to open a market for Luther Marsh peat fuel in the 1920s and 1930s, but those also never developed into viable commercial ventures. In the northern part of the province there were trials to burn peat in electrical generating plants, and by the Ontario Northland Railway as fuel for locomotives, but those were considered unsuccessful experiments.
Other countries with extensive peat deposits, and particularly Finland, developed technologies through the 20th century to use peat efficiently, and to enable peat bogs to regenerate themselves. But there was little interest in that work in Canada except by a small group of fanatical advocates.
Canada has roughly 40% of the world’s deposits of peat, but today there is no commercial use in this country as fuel. On the other hand, Canada is the world’s leader in the production of peat moss for horticultural purposes.
In today’s marketplace, the deposits in Wellington County are far too small to be of interest for any commercial purposes. But had those experiments more than a century ago found success, the history of north Wellington would have been much different.