We used to make things in this country. #156: W. Gordon Steel Works, Tweed, Ontario

This company began in 1869 as a foundry operated by William Garrett, first in Actinolite and then Georgetown (Tweed).  The factory burned in 1891 (taking the Methodist church with it).

Around about 1918, his son sold the foundry to S.G. Way, who operated it as the Dominion Foundry.  In 1929, it was purchased by W.S. Gordon.  In 1946, Mr. Gordon's son-in-law assumed ownership, operating the firm as Tweed Foundries Limited until 1958 when it closed.  An example of their wares can be seen at the O'Hara Mill Homestead near Madoc, Ontario.

There was another Tweed company called the Steel Trough and Machine Company, which may have been associated with the foundry as a Mr. Wilber Gordon was President and Manager.   

Photographed just north of Odessa, Ontario

The company was incorporated in 1904, at first manufacturing only a patent feed trough.  By 1910, they were employing 40 people and offering a wide variety of steel items:  Rowe lavoratories, sanitary closets, steel tanks, steel troughs, steel cheese vats, maple evaporators, self-measuring pumps, gasoline tanks, street sprinkling tanks, milk cooling tanks, garbage cans, feed and water troughs, food cookers, grain boxes, coal chutes, threshers' tanks, smokestacks and galvanized culverts.  It seems that at some point they became Tweed Steel.

1954

Information and images above taken from Tweed.  A Centennial Mosaic.  (Tweed & Area Historical Society, 1990).

Canadian Homes, June 1961