How Nickel Built Port Colborne: The INCO Refinery Story

In the summer of 1916, directors of the International Nickel Company — INCO — met to discuss buying land in Port Colborne, a small town on the northeast shore of Lake Erie about 30 kilometres southwest of Niagara Falls. The First World War had cut off the company's ability to ship its raw matte across the border to be refined in New Jersey, so INCO needed its first nickel refinery on Canadian soil. Port Colborne was an ideal fit: it sat at the Lake Erie mouth of the Welland Canal, giving deep-water shipping access to the Great Lakes; it had rail connections; and it could draw on the abundant hydroelectric power generated in the Niagara region. The refinery began operations in 1918, and the decision tied the town's fortunes to the metal for generations to come.

For roughly a hundred years, nickel defined Port Colborne. The refinery processed nickel and copper shipped down from INCO's vast mining and smelting operations in Sudbury, and it became one of the town's largest employers, drawing workers and families and shaping the community around the harbour. The Niagara Falls Public Library's Historic Niagara digital archive preserves period photographs of the plant — catalogued simply as 'Plant of International Nickel Co., Port Colborne, Ont.' — alongside images of the Canadian Starch Factory and the grain elevators that crowded the same waterfront. Together they show a working harbour town where heavy industry, lake shipping, and the canal all met. The operation evolved over the decades: the site eventually stopped refining nickel, and today it functions as a cobalt and precious-metals refinery and as a nickel packaging, warehousing, and distribution centre.

Port Colborne's industrial heritage is easy to trace on a visit. The historic harbour and the canal that drew INCO here are still the heart of the city, and the Port Colborne Historical and Marine Museum gathers the stories of the canal, the lake, and the industries that grew alongside them. The old grain elevators and mill buildings near the Lake Erie entrance to the Welland Canal remain landmarks on the skyline, best appreciated from West Street or the canal walkway. If you want to picture the town as it looked in the early refinery era, the Niagara Falls Public Library's free online archive is the place to start — its photographs of the plant, the mills, and the harbour let you stand where the camera once stood and watch a lakeside town turn into an industrial centre.