Another prosperous operation was carried on at this time by the Laycock family, who had come originally from Buffalo to Cultus in Houghton Township, Norfolk County. To expedite the movement of logs from their forested properties they built a wooden-railed railway from Cultus to Big Creek. As the logs were cut they were drawn to their railroad and loaded on flatbed cars, to be drawn by horses to the bank of Big Creek. Here they were tipped into the water to be floated to the Inner Bay of Long Point, where they were made up into huge log booms and towed by steam tugs to Buffalo. A sawmill at Tonawanda, New York, was equipped to saw logs up to 80 feet in length.
It is of interest to note that by 1851, the newly established County of Norfolk had over six hundred people employed in sawmill operations and the County boasted three times as many sawmills per capita as the average number province-wide.
2 The West Family in Norfolk County
According to the 1861 Census, Thomas West, occupation sawyer, was living on Lot 23, Concession 14, in the Township of Walsingham, one mile west of the village of Lynedoch. He is known to have lived there prior to 1861. Born in 1817 in Glasgow, Scotland, Thomas, along with his wife, immigrated to Upper Canada where he lived to the ripe old age of ninety-eight. His wife, Margaret McGhaughey, born in 1827 in Paisley, Scotland, lived to be ninety-six years of age.1
The Wests emigrated from Scotland to Canada about 1843, and were known to be living in Dundas, Ontario, when their first child, John Ceburn West, was born on August 21, 1844. The young John worked in Dundas before the family moved to the Lynedoch area when he was in his early teens. Once settled there, Thomas took up employment in the lumber business. Here, they raised a family of five more boys and two girls. The youngest, Isobelle, died as a young girl.
John West, a bright and industrious lad, was soon accompanying his father to work in the woods or in the local sawmills. Their chief employer was John Charlton, a prominent lumberman of Lynedoch. John had a mechanical turn of mind and though he obtained little more than a basic formal education, he was intrigued by the steam engines that powered many of the sawmills working in the area. For a time he had worked for McKechnie and Bertram, machine toolmakers in Dundas, an experience that had sparked an early interest in machinery.
By the time he was twenty-one, West had a thorough understanding of the lumber business, having been a part of it all, from felling the trees and transporting them to the mill, to all the operations required in the mill to produce quality lumber in its many forms for the markets of the day. He is known to have worked in a sawmill near Langton in Walsingham Township, as well as many other sawmill employers in the area. However, he was not content.
John West had grown to be a big, well-proportioned man with a kind and humorous disposition. He was self-educated, ambitious, adventurous, very practical, and very well-liked by his fellow associates. He liked a good story and was himself an accomplished raconteur. But, above all, he had an uncanny ability to make anything mechanical and he loved anything powered by steam. With the advent of the railways with their powerful steam locomotives opening up the country, steam power was just coming into its own. Steam-powered freighters were also rapidly replacing the schooners and sailing vessels on the lakes and the high seas. And now mobile sawmills, powered by steam, were making the harvest of more remote forested areas more practical.
Around 1865, John West went to Simcoe where he was employed by the firm of John and George Jackson, prominent building contractors in the town. About this time he met Margaret Elliott who had recently emigrated from County Donegal in Ireland to join three older sisters now living in Norfolk County. John and Margaret were married on August 21, 1866, the date of his twenty-second birthday. West continued working for the Jacksons and gained a wide experience in methods of construction of all manner of buildings. He also expanded his contacts with tradesmen and suppliers to the building industry as the Jackson brothers gave him more and more responsibilities in their building projects. He remained in their employ for approximately ten years.
This photograph of John Ceburn West was taken circa 1875.
Courtesy of Clarence F. Coons, Mrs. Gordon Skinner Collection.
3 The West & Peachey Partnership, 1878
While working for the Jacksons in Simcoe, John Ceburn West had been building a nest egg for himself with the intention of establishing his own business. The many sawmills in the county were busy and this meant steady work for foundries and others involved in the installation and maintenance of their equipment. With the land rapidly being cleared of its forest cover, farming was coming to the fore, and the demand for farm equipment and its maintenance was providing meaningful jobs for those with a mechanical bent. To West, the economic climate seemed favourable. On January 8, 1878, he leased the Simcoe Iron Works, a small, old foundry located on the northwest corner of Colborne and Young streets in Simcoe, and owned by Silas Montross and Donald Fisher of Fisher’s Glen on Lake Erie.
Within a few weeks West formed a partnership with James Peachey, a young man with a machinist’s background who had recently arrived from Brantford, Ontario. This alliance proved most successful and was destined to last for the next forty years, terminated only by the death of the senior partner. It was said that in all that time these two friends never exchanged a harsh word, nor did they have any major differences of opinion during their long business career together.
James Peachey was born in Hamilton, Ontario, on May 29, 1856, the son of Abraham Peachey, a native of England. The Peachey family moved to Brantford, Ontario, in 1860 when James was still a child. When he was seventeen years old, James Peachey was apprenticed to Charles H. Waterous. His firm, which later became the Waterous Engine Works of Brantford, would become one of Canada’s leading producers of industrial and farm steam engines, as well as a leader in the production of sawmill equipment.1
Having successfully completed his four-year apprenticeship, James Peachey moved to Simcoe in 1877, where he met and became friends with John West. Less than a year later he joined with West to establish the firm of West & Peachey, an enterprise that prospered from the very beginning. On May 26, 1881, James Peachey married Annie Weeks in Brantford, and in due course they had a family of seven children. James Peachey was an energetic, quiet-spoken, community-minded person who, like West, became one of Simcoe’s most respected citizens, a man who was extremely dedicated in everything he did.
A photograph of James Peachey, John West’s partner, believed to have been taken circa 1882.
Courtesy of Norfolk Historical Society, File 14, Neg. 6-7.
From early advertisements, it can be noted that the firm of West & Peachey was prepared to execute all orders in machine-work castings, turnings, and related repair and the like. They also offered to build many agricultural tools and implements and supply parts for such implements. Among those tools and implements offered were hand and power straw cutters, cultivators, field rollers, corn huskers, power and hand corn shellers, ploughs, and plough castings. In addition, they offered to build pumps and tuyere (a constriction in the spout to increase the water pressure) pump spouts, iron piping, saw clamps, box and coal stoves, iron fencing, and cresting. The firm proudly advertised that they had exclusive Canadian rights to the use of the celebrated diamond iron, a new iron-making process that produced a more durable product, resistant to wear, which they used in the production of quality plough points and in the building of metal shoes for bobsleighs and cutters.
Peachey’s association with Charles Waterous was no doubt instrumental