Port Colborne's Flour Mills: Robin Hood, Maple Leaf and the Milling Heritage of the Lake Erie Canal Entrance

The settlement we now call Port Colborne began in 1832 as Gravelly Bay, named for the shallow, bedrock-floored bay on the Lake Erie shore. When the First Welland Canal was pushed through to reach Lake Erie in 1833, the little harbour gained the one thing that would define its next century — a deep-water connection between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario that let ships bypass Niagara Falls. The community was renamed in honour of Sir John Colborne, the British war hero and Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada at the time the southern terminus opened. Because Port Colborne sat at the very mouth of the canal, grain coming down from the prairies and the American midwest had to pass its docks. Where grain gathers, mills follow. By the early twentieth century the waterfront at the Lake Erie entrance had filled with grain elevators, feed companies and flour mills, turning a quiet bay into one of the busiest milling harbours on the lower Great Lakes.

The landmark that still dominates Port Colborne's northern skyline is the Robin Hood Flour Mill. The plant was built during the 1940s as part of Robin Hood's wartime expansion across Canada, and its location — wedged between the railway and the Welland Canal — meant flour could be loaded onto rail cars or lake freighters and moved west or south with ease. Demand for flour ran high during the Second World War, and the mill became part of daily life on the home front: it employed women and teenagers while many men were overseas, and it even produced its own local radio programme, "On Parade," where guests played games like name-that-tune for prizes. At its peak in the 1960s the mill employed around seventy people and shipped flour to every corner of Canada and the United States. The flour operation finally closed in 2007. After changing hands, the site was acquired in 2009 by Ceres Global Ag Corp, a grain company that re-purposed the building into a grain handling and distribution terminal — so the great mill on Sherwood Forest Lane still works the canal, just with grain rather than flour.

Robin Hood was not alone. For decades the Maple Leaf Milling Company operated a large plant at Port Colborne, and historic photographs in the local collections show the Maple Leaf Mill standing alongside the Government Elevator and the Niagara Grain & Feed Company at the same stretch of harbour. This cluster of mills and elevators existed because Port Colborne was the natural transfer point at the Lake Erie end of the canal: lake freighters could unload prairie wheat directly into the elevators, the mills could grind it into flour, and the finished product went straight back out by ship or rail. The town's milling story is bound up with the wider grain economy of the canal — and, soberingly, with its dangers. Port Colborne was the site of a grain-elevator explosion in 1919 that killed ten workers, a reminder that handling vast quantities of grain dust was hazardous work. Together the mills, elevators and feed companies made Port Colborne a true industrial harbour rather than simply a place ships passed through.

You do not need a ticket to appreciate Port Colborne's milling past — much of it is still part of the working waterfront. The Robin Hood building rises like a behemoth above the north end of town and is visible from the canal and the surrounding trails; the multi-use Welland Canal recreational path runs north out of Port Colborne and gives walkers and cyclists long views of the elevators and mill structures along the water. Down at the south end, the historic harbour and Lock 8 area is where you can watch lakers enter the canal much as grain ships did a century ago. For the full story, the Port Colborne Historical and Marine Museum keeps an extensive archive, and the digitised historic-image collections at the Niagara Falls Public Library and the Welland Public Library hold dozens of photographs of the Robin Hood and Maple Leaf mills, the Government Elevator and the early canal. Photographs of these mills in their working years are some of the most evocative records of Niagara's south coast.