Electricity comes to St. Catharines
Electric Light and Power Company formed in 1886
It might be said that the Age of Electricity began in St. Catharines in 1886.
It was in that year that the St. Catharines Electric Light and Power Company Co. was formed and began producing direct current electricity, using a small generating station located at Lock 5 of the Second Welland Canal (near the intersection of Westchester Crescent and Oakdale Avenue).
Among the firm’s first customers was the City of St. Catharines.
Result: by the end of 1886 some 15 electric street lights shone along a stretch of St. Paul Street, replacing the former gas lights. In the following year the city’s street car system was converted from horse-power to electric power.
It was not until 1893 that a second firm entered the electricity field locally — the firm of Cooke and Sons Ltd. — building first a steam-generated power plant to supply electricity to local factories, followed four years later by a small hydro plant at Lock 3 of the Old Canal, below Old Glenridge.
But soon serious competitors to those two local firms came on the scene.
Hamilton interests in 1896 formed the Hamilton Cataract Light and Power Co., which within two years opened the first power plant at Decew Falls.
That plant’s prime purpose was to produce power for the City of Hamilton, but it also developed a subsidiary, the Lincoln Electric Light and Power Co., which soon purchased the two existing St. Catharines hydro firms, merged them, and began itself supplying electrical power to St. Catharines from the new Decew facility.
Getting that hydro power across the three miles from Decew Falls into the city posed some problems.
Erecting the power lines from there to the edge of downtown St. Catharines was not terribly complicated, but there was a last challenge in getting the hydro power the final short distance across the Old Canal and into downtown.
The company initially laid a cable under the Old Canal, but it was snagged and severed too often by passing ships.
To avoid that Lincoln Electric constructed our famous “tallest concrete poles in the world” to take the cables over the masts of the tallest ship that might pass by. (Yes, at that late date, there were still some ships using the Old Canal.)
But what does the modest little concrete building shown in our old photo this week have to do with all this?
That building, erected in 1906, was the transformer or distribution building that was a key last link between the generators at Decew Falls and the city’s hydro consumers. It played that role first for Lincoln Electric Light and Power, then for the HydroElectric Power Commission of Ontario starting in 1930, and finally for the St. Catharines Public Utilities Commission from 1940 on.
The facility eventually fell into disuse and was demolished in 1976.
Our “today” photo this week shows the hillside running from the 406 up toward Old Glenridge. It was near the bottom of that slope that the little hydro transformer building used to stand.