Over the years the town sought and relied on the advice of John West regarding engineering or mechanical matters. It was always sound advice. John West also served as an alderman for many years. When the town installed water and sewer services in 1905, John West was chair of the committee overseeing the work. When the sewer system was installed, West was on the job an average of nine hours a day superintending the work with no thought of remuneration. It was acknowledged that he saved the town thousands of dollars through his foresight and practical understanding of engineering.
During West’s long career he often suffered personal hardships and injury. Over and above the usual cuts and bruises experienced in the daily operations of the foundry, he suffered the occasional more serious accident. In October 1901, while operating the wheel of a hoisting machine, West’s hand slipped, allowing the wheel to reverse. The handle struck him a stunning blow to the head, cutting his forehead badly. Fortunately, he was not seriously hurt. West usually travelled to and from work on a bicycle. While returning to work after lunch one August afternoon in 1905, West accidentally collided with another cyclist. He was thrown to the street and in the fall received severe cuts and bruises to his face. It was feared that he had suffered a concussion from the fall. This proved to be untrue, but he was confined to his home for a few days to recover from the experience.
An accident of a more serious nature occurred in April 1913, while West was supervising the moving of an Alligator tug from the assembly yard behind the factory. A chain, holding the taut, heavy wire cable used to move the tug, suddenly gave way. The cable spun out of control like a whip, striking West violently and knocking him down. As he fell, his head struck the door frame of the building nearby, causing severe lacerations to his ear and badly bruising his face. For a time he lay unconscious. Recovering, he later returned to work, but he was obviously badly shaken up. Many felt that West never fully recovered from that unfortunate accident.
The firm of West & Peachey was still very much involved with maintenance and repair of equipment in area sawmills and canning factories. John West obviously had an interest that went far beyond simple maintenance of equipment, for in March 1890 he received a patent for his application for “Improvements to Cannery Hoist.” This consisted of an improved method of lifting containers, or retorts (also a John West innovation) of canned goods from a steam box, or cooker, by means of a travelling hoist that ran backward or forward on a track over the cooker. He explained its operation in the greatest of detail and detailed drawings accompanied the application.4
THE FISHING TUGHAZARD
In the spring of 1892, West & Peachey received an order from Edward Harris of London, Ontario, a member of the prestigious duck-hunting club known as The Long Point Company. Harris wanted machinery to operate a 65-foot fishing tug. The tug, a wooden vessel clad in spruce planking, with a beam of 11 feet, and drawing 6 feet of water, was built in Simcoe for the Company by Findlay Steinhoff. In June 1892, the tug, minus an engine, was loaded on a quartet of four-wheeled wagons and drawn to Port Dover by sixteen husky horses. Once there it was launched in Lake Erie.
After the tug was in the water, West & Peachey installed the steam engine they had built for it, and tested the vessel in trial runs on the lake. The tug handled well and the machinery worked superbly. Mayor Campbell of Simcoe had the honour of naming the tug, giving it his wife’s maiden name of Hazard. Once in operation in the Lake Erie fishery, the Hazard was operated by Captain George Field.
A model of the tug was built at the time and given to the mayor’s grandson. In recent years this model, on loan from Douglas Trafford of Vittoria, has been admired in the Port Dover Harbour Museum. It sold at auction on October 13, 2008, for $925.
JOHN WEST’S STEAM ROAD-MAKING SLEIGH
With the sudden popularity of the Alligator Warping Tug in harvesting the forest trees of both Ontario and Quebec, John West and James Peachey were becoming acquainted with most of the great timber barons of Canada. Soon both men were hearing of other problems in the logging industry that the proprietors of these mammoth logging firms were experiencing. One that was regularly broached to them was that of the creation of winter roads.
Each fall, timber crews went into the woods to harvest the pine. The trees were felled, cut into logs, and piled in skidways in the bush. In late December or January, when sufficient snow had accumulated to make sleighing possible, teams of horses, hitched to heavy bobsleighs piled high with pine logs, drew them out of the bush to the nearest lake or river. In preparation for moving these heavily loaded sleighs, the roads would be plowed out and the snow packed solidly on the roadbed. Next a large, wooden water tank mounted on a sleigh would be drawn over the road to water down the tracks. The water would freeze very quickly at that time of year, forming a slick running surface for the heavily loaded logging sleighs.
The water tanks had to be filled regularly from nearby lakes or streams, which often created problems for the road builders. These water-tanker sleighs were filled by using their team of horses to repeatedly pull a large, wooden barrel full of water out of a hole chopped in the lake ice and up a runway of two slanted poles. At the top, the barrel tipped, emptying its contents into the tanker sleigh. This had to be repeated one hundred times or more to obtain a full tank.
The team of horses on right are pulling a barrel of water from a hole in the ice of a lake to fill the sleigh-mounted water tank. The water will then be used to ice the tote road. Photo taken in the Blind River area.
Courtesy of the Clarence F. Coons Collection.
Always ready for a new challenge, John West’s fertile imagination went to work. He envisaged a steam-operated sleigh that would make the water tank obsolete. At his drafting table he designed a steam road-making sleigh that would rapidly clear a road through the accumulated snow, and at the same time leave a smooth, ice-hardened track behind it for the easy passage of log sleighs. In 1891 he built the first one. A vertical boiler was mounted securely on a sleigh equipped with hollow runners. A snowplow was attached to the front of his machine for clearing away surplus snow in the roadway. The steam from the boiler, in passing through the hollow runners, melted the snow. The front of the runner, being very hot from the live steam’s point of entry, would melt the snow on contact. As the condensed steam passed out the rear of the runner it added moisture to the wet, compressed track, which rapidly froze to leave an ice-hardened track for sleighs that would follow.
A sketch of the steam road-making sleigh in operation on a logging road.
L.A. Dool, artist. Courtesy of the Clarence F. Coons Collection.
In December 1891, West accompanied his first steam road-making sleigh to the woods for testing. No records of the results of these tests are to be found today. It satisfied West sufficiently for him to apply for a patent for what he described as: “An Improved Road Making Sleigh.” The introduction to the detailed description and drawings that he supplied to the patent office read as follows and described its purpose: “A sleigh capable of rapidly clearing a road through snow, leaving behind it a smooth, hard track for the passage of other vehicles.”5
On November 22, 1893, West was granted a patent for his novel invention. The machine was on the market for a few years, but it would appear that not many of them were sold. For those that did go into operation, they used too much steam in melting the snow and the majority of the logging roads proved to be too long to make the elaborate sleighs practical.