Closure ends DeLaval’s 106-year presence
In its heyday, DeLaval employed hundreds at Park and Lansdowne
DeLaval, a leading producer of dairy and farming machinery, closed its local office for good on Friday after 106 years in Peterborough.
The company was established in 1912 in the city, and its factory buildings once occupied the entire property at Park and Lansdowne St. that is now home to Staples and Home Depot.
Only one original building survives there, a yellow-brick office building.
DeLaval has its head office in Sweden, and the Peterborough offices stayed open over the years even as the factory production dwindled.
Office workers continued to be employed here in what were the main DeLaval offices for Canada.
But the office moved from Park St. to other locations in Peterborough, over the years: it moved to its final location on Jameson Dr. in 2011. Prior to that, it had been on Fisher Dr. for 22 years.
Andrew Ritchie, sales dealer and channel director for DeLaval, wrote in an email to The Examiner that there were only two people left working in the Jameson Dr. office when it closed.
“Considering the very low number of employees left, it made organizational sense to close our Peterborough office as
of Aug. 31 and give the opportunity to these two employees to continue their function from a home office – which they have accepted,” Ritchie wrote.
Ivan Bateman worked at DeLaval for 30 years — as a designer and later a manager — from 1954 to 1984.
He said that in its heyday, DeLaval employed between 350 and 400 people. They manufactured items such as pasteurization vessels, butter churns and equipment for cheese factories.
DeLaval also made vacuum pumps that were widely used by dairy farmers.
“We manufactured them for all of North America,” Bateman said.
It was a good place to work, he said, as long as you could avoid the areas in the plant where they were machining cast iron.
“It’s a pretty filthy material,” Bateman said.
Bateman’s work with DeLaval ended once his division moved to Scarborough. He opted not to move with it; he went on to work for the city of Peterborough.
At that time DeLaval’s manufacturing contracts were increasingly being farmed out to other plants, Bateman said, and then the engineering and sales departments moved to Scarborough in 1985.
“The factory was steadily shrinking.”
Elwood Jones, archivist at Trent Valley Archives, said the surviving DeLaval office building on Park St. – built in 1913 – was state-of-the-art in its day.
“It was considered to be the best office building in the city, at the time,” he said.
Jones also said DeLaval made custom parts for cream separators for the North American market – and the blueprints for those parts are now kept at Trent Valley Archives.
TVA also has an extensive collection of photos and archives from DeLaval, he said.
“They were a complex operation – pretty sophisticated.”