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Retrieval
Number: 7776/31 |
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Two
foundries provided an important industrial base for the Sackville economy
through the later 19th and much of the 20th centuries. The earliest
of these plants was the Fawcett Foundry established in 1852. Renamed
the Sackville Stove Company in 1860, the plant initially produced stoves
under licence to a Massachusetts firm but by the 1870s was turning
out its own products. With new rail connections in the 1880s, the foundry
imported sand, local scrap iron, pig iron from Ontario, coke from Pennsylvania,
and steel from Ontario using a purpose-built spur line off the New
Brunswick and Prince Edward Island line. The plant was destroyed by
fire in 1893 but rebuilt and expanded in the following year to the
dimensions shown in this image, including a moulding shop, a two-storey
workshop, a series of three-storey warehouses, additional storage buildings
and a large showroom. By the first decade of the 20th century, the
local press proclaimed the foundry to be ‘one of Eastern Canada’s
leading industrial concerns and one of the largest in the Dominion’ with
a ‘powerhouse the best east of Montreal’ and ‘showrooms
superior to the showrooms of any other stove manufacturers in the whole
Dominion’ (Sackville Tribune Post, 21 December 1908). The Fawcett
family company was absorbed by Enamel and Heating Products in 1928
and with the addition of a new enamelling plant in 1946 production
at the foundry flourished, reaching its peak in the 1960s. By the 1970s,
however, with increased foreign competition and with its production
facilities out-moded, the Fawcett Foundry was in trouble. Enamel and
Heating Products bought the rival Enterprise Foundry in 1984 and closed
the Fawcett Foundry. The buildings noted in this document were destroyed
in 1986. Little remains of the proud industry that once provided an
important complement to the agricultural economy of the Tantramar through
much of the 20th century. |
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This
project was made possible -in part or entirely - through the Canadian
Culture Online Program of Canadian Heritage, the National Archives of
Canada and the Canadian Council of Archives. |
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