and at times lawless frontier village.”12 After an 1830 survey, settlers began to arrive in significant numbers. The result was a mix of English, Irish and Scottish immigrants, fugitive slaves from the United States, and Native Canadians and Americans that did not always mix well. The catalysts for conflict included rivalries across different ethnic groups, the easy availability of “whiskey and other spirits at trifling costs” and local gangs of ruffians. One of the latter, known as the “Swampers,” “met on public and market days, and had it out with clubs and axe handles, often joining forces to club quiet citizens right and left.”13
Despite its rough early years, Brantford began to prosper. Geographically, it grew north of the Grand River, down Colborne, spreading out on its east and west sides. Its proximity to the river was a key consideration in the nineteenth century, when the river served as a major thoroughfare for passengers and freight. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Grand River Navigation Company built a canal to provide Brantford’s downtown businesses with easy access to the river. The canal, which lay adjacent to present-day Wharf Street, was not successful because railways soon replaced the river as the major means of transport. A farmer’s market, which was formally established in 1847, sold local produce and goods, and was a focus for mercantile trade and gossip. Hotels, industries, businesses, churches, law firms, local government, courts, and retail stores flourished, making downtown Brantford the true centre of the city.
One hundred years after its beginnings, Brantford was a town that was going places. Its success was rooted in the fertile agricultural land that surrounded it and in an entrepreneurial tradition that made Brantford an international centre for manufacturing. In 1877, Brantford officially became a city. In 1901, The Industrial Recorder of Canada ranked it “third of importance among the exporting cities of Canada.”14 By then, Brantford was a world leader in the production of farm machinery and well-known for the manufacture of many other products — sawmill equipment, paint and varnish, stoves, windmills, and bicycles. The companies that were the basis of the city’s industrial success made up a veritable who’s who of agricultural manufacturing in Canada: the Waterous Engine Works; the Cockshutt Plow Company; Goold, Shapley and Muir; J.O. Wisner, Son & Co.; Verity Plow; A. Harris & Son; and ultimately Massey-Harris.
During the twentieth century, Brantford continued to flourish as a centre of agricultural manufacturing. Cockshutt Plow was bought by White Farm Equipment, which became a central component of Brantford’s economy. Many of Brantford’s other key companies were consolidated. Massey-Harris absorbed Wisener and Verity Plow and became Massey-Harris-Fergus, then Massey Ferguson. In the latter incarnation, it expanded to become the world’s largest manufacturer of agricultural machinery, outperforming its closest competitor, the Ford Motor Company. In Brantford, Massey’s positive economic impact was augmented by the arrival of other businesses. In 1918, the Brantford mayor, Morrison Mann MacBride, met Herbert Fisk Johnson Sr., the head of S.C. Johnson and Son, Ltd., on a train going to Toronto and persuaded him to establish the Canadian headquarters of S.C. Johnson in Brantford. Brantford’s economic punch was augmented by the success and growth of the Stedman Store empire, which began as a single store on Colborne and grew into one of Canada’s largest retail chains by the 1960s, incorporating three hundred stores across the country.
The cover of the 1897 catalogue for the Goold Bicycle Company presents an idealized image of rural living at the end of the nineteenth century. The caption under the stamp reads: Brantford Bicycles Are the Highest Standard of Excellence the World Over. The printing on the barn reads: Brantford. The Home of Good Manufacture.
Ride The Brantford. They are the best.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Massey-Harris was world-renowned for the quality of its products. This advertisement displays a Russian farmer harvesting his grain with Massey- Harris machinery.
Brantford never experienced the growth that characterized cities like Toronto and Hamilton, but it enjoyed a robust blue-collar prosperity until the 1970s. The citizens of Brantford were proud, even self-satisfied. They celebrated their participation in the World Wars; built monuments and parks and grand buildings; established a historical society dedicated to the history of Brant County; honoured Alexander Graham Bell, Pauline Johnson, and other Brantford notables; nurtured institutions like the nationally celebrated Ross McDonald School for the Blind and the Brantford Golf and Country Club; embraced social clubs, fraternal societies, and churches; promoted charities; formed unions; debated local, provincial, and broader issues with intensity; and had their significance (and the significance of Six Nations) repeatedly confirmed by royal visits.15 In the historical core of the city — the core from which Brantford sprang — stately public buildings, an elegant Victoria Square, and a vibrant downtown reflected the city’s history of success.
The unravelling of Brantford’s self-assured demeanour began with the collapse of its industrial economy in the early 1980s. A history of good fortune began to reverse itself abruptly when a confluence of economic forces undermined the market for agricultural machinery. The casualties included the manufacturing operations that had traditionally defined Brantford. The starkly pessimistic attitudes that Holly Cox and I encountered when we met with Brantford high-school students in 2000 were a direct descendant of a series of developments that sent Brantford’s economy — and with it, its downtown — spiralling downhill.
| 2 | THE WORST DOWNTOWN IN CANADA
In Brantford, the fall of the downtown was rooted in the collapse of its manufacturing sector. In the early 1980s, low commodity prices and high debt charges produced an economy in which farmers could not afford to buy expensive farm equipment. The financial constraints this produced wreaked havoc on an economy built on the manufacture of agricultural machinery. One of the signs of trouble was local jokes about the rise of Brantford’s own “red sea.” It consisted of ever-expanding waves of Massey Ferguson’s distinctive red combines, which rolled off factory production lines and, in the absence of buyers, accumulated in city parking lots.
Before Brantford’s economy collapsed, the major employers in the city were White Farm and Massey Ferguson. Between them they maintained a workforce of more than seven thousand people in a city of eighty thousand. The unimaginable came to pass when their plants closed and they ceased their operations. In the wake of their demise, the companies that supplied them drastically reduced their workforce or shut their doors entirely. Mayor Mike Hancock, who was the manager of the local Human Resources and Development Canada office, remembers “desperate times” as unemployment soared to 24 per cent and he and others looked for ways to revive a defunct economy.1 Speaking to the Canadian House of Commons in January 1994, the Brant member of Parliament, Jane Stewart, spoke of the problems that continued to persist. “Not very long ago,” she said, “the city of Brant[ford] boasted having five thousand of the highest-paying manufacturing jobs in North America … those jobs are all gone. Those companies are all closed and we … are trying to rebuild our economy.”2
It took years for Brantford to recover from the collapse of its economy. Downtown, the problems were compounded by the trends that have adversely affected downtowns everywhere. In the twentieth-century city, the rise of the automobile made transportation easy, making the suburbs the place to live and shopping malls the place to shop. In Brantford, the flight from the city core exacerbated the problems already evident downtown, producing derelict buildings and empty streets. In the 1980s and 1990s,
