Towers of Grain: Feeding Edwardian Britain
´´Silo number 1, built in 1902 in the Port of Montreal, linked the burgeoning wheat farms on the Prairies with the urban markets in the United Kingdom. New industrial-scale flour mills were built in Birkenhead near Liverpool and West Ham on the eastern edge of London between 1899 and 1905. On the Prairies, Ogilvie Milling Company, the British American Company, Grain Growers’ Grain Company and others built thousands of grain elevators to feed wheat into the railways. Railways and steamships linked these towers together. Settlers and farming in the Canadian Prairies required industrial technology from the start, and this provides an important reminder the Industrial Revolution did not stop at the city limits of Manchester, Glasgow, or Montreal. This walking tour, led by Jim Clifford and Stéphane Castonguay, will use digital materials to explore the transnational history of the grain silos in the Port of Montreal and Prairie wheat fields.
The tour will commence 7:00pm at the Art Nouveau entrance of the Square-Victoria–OACI metro station.
