Port Rowan began to develop after the railway arrived.
Port Dover boomed with the arrival of the Hamilton and Northwestern Railway (H&NW), a resource line that extended through Hamilton and Allandale (Barrie), and on to the shores of Georgian Bay at Collingwood, while the Lake Erie and Northern Railway (LE&N) from Kitchener to Port Dover provided a second route for that community. Meanwhile, at the western end, Hiram Walker was creating a route from Windsor to Leamington to help bring raw material to his distillery at Walkerville.
By 1880, Walker’s steel rails had reached as far as Wheatley, as well. In fact, many of the lake’s ports were enjoying the vital rail links, including Erieau, Port Stanley, Port Burwell, Port Rowan, Port Dover, Port Maitland, Dunnville, and Fort Erie. Connecting these ports to vital American markets, car ferries began a long era of cross-lake shipping. Erieau, Port Stanley, Port Dover, and Port Maitland benefitted from their links with Ashtabula and Conneaut in Ohio on the American shore. Railcars would be shunted onto the large vessels carrying coal into Canada, and a variety of raw materials into the United States. It was a romantic era that would last well into the 1950s. (The tradition continues to this day with the Jiiman and the Pelee Islander offering the last cross-lake ferry service linking Leamington and Kingsville with Sandusky. This time, however, the “cars” are not railcars, but automobiles).
Railway car ferries shuttled between ports on the Canadian side and those on the American side.
A system of radial streetcar lines was emerging, as well, and for the first three decades of the twentieth century they operated to places like Kingsville, Leamington, Port Stanley, Erieau, and Port Colborne.
No industry benefitted more from the arrival of the rails than did fishing. The lake had long been well-known for its quantity and variety of fish such as blue pike, walleye, and whitefish. Natives gathered at places like Long Point for the bounty of the fish. Early on, local fishermen were able to fish close to shore and supply the nearby settlements with a plentiful supply using the simple hook-and-line technique. As settlements and markets grew, linen seine nets came into use as fishing boats grew ever larger. By the 1860s, the seine nets had been replaced by the more efficient “pound” nets, allowing the fishermen to cash in on the sudden increase in demand due to the American Civil War.
Punters, such as shown by the harbour at Port Rowan, were used in the early days of fishing on Lake Erie.
But the opening of the canals and the extension of the rail lines meant that fishing could now become an export industry. By the 1870s, the rowboats and skiffs were giving way to steam-powered tugs while methods changed from the local pound nets to trawling. Fishing boats became enclosed, allowing for longer trips and for sorting to take place right on deck. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, pound net licenses tripled from 260 to nearly 700 while gill net yardage increased five times from 300,000 to over 1.5 million. In 1915, more than 1,000 fishermen were fishing out of 425 boats.
The invention of the enclosed fishing tug, now in universal use on Lake Erie, helped make the lake’s fishery more efficient and more profitable.
Through the late 1800s, lake herring and blue pike were the dominant species. But the lake’s fish species faced many challenges: clearing of the land for farming, which altered the water tables and reduced habitat, and the entry of the deadly sea lamprey, an ocean-going predator that literally sucked the life out of any fish to which it attached itself, altered drastically the makeup of the fish stocks. By the 1950s the blue pike was extinct while walleye and whitefish had all but disappeared, leaving yellow perch and rainbow smelt to become the dominant species. Fishing grounds were shifting, as well. Boats in and west of Port Stanley hauled aboard more than 10 million kilograms of fish, while east of Port Stanley, once the lake’s most fertile fishing grounds, the haul was less than a quarter of that. And most of that remained at Port Dover, where the catch was almost entirely smelt. The fish most popular in local restaurants, yellow perch, comes from the tugs that operate out of Port Stanley and Erieau. Wheatley, however, has become the most prolific of the fishing harbours, bringing in more than twice the tonnage of any other port and a greater variety, as well. All told, Lake Erie’s eleven main fishing ports in 2007 boasted nearly two hundred commercial fishing license holders, a figure that ensures the lake’s title as the largest freshwater fishing fleet in the world.
A gas field is under way near Port Burwell, an often forgotten industry on the Lake Erie shore.
Not only did the railways usher in more industry, but a new type of lake user — the tourist. As the Great Lakes area became more urbanized, residents who were crowded into smoky, growing cities sought places to which they could escape. Soon, excursion trains were carrying the throngs to Lake Erie’s many sand beaches. Amusement parks sprang up nearly everywhere, some with their own short line trains with colourful names like the Sandfly Express and the Pegleg.
Crystal Beach and Erie Beach on the eastern end attracted Americans in particular, while those at Port Stanley and Port Burwell herded crowds from places like London, and Port Dover largely appealed to vacationers from Hamilton. Soon the Americans were buying up large stretches of shoreline for summer homes, creating private, often gated, communities with their own exclusive station stops.
While the western beaches were scarcer and farther from large urban centres, those at Rondeau, Point Pelee, and Leamington soon boasted hotels and campgrounds and cottages, as well.
Meanwhile, away from the shoreline, agriculture was evolving. By the late 1800s, the traditional mixed-farming economy of wheat and livestock was being replaced with more specialized agriculture. The fertile soils and the warm climates of the extreme southwest was spawning a busy vegetable-growing and greenhouse industry, in particular, tomatoes around Leamington. Tobacco-growing began in the Essex area around the early 1900s and found more fertile ground on the then-depleted sand plains of Norfolk County in the 1920s. Large tracts of marshlands in the Erieau, Turkey Point, and Point Pelee areas, and on Pelee Island, were drained for vegetable-growing.
But fishing, farming, and forestry were not the Erie shore’s only industries. A now-forgotten story is that of the oil and gas industry, which operated from 1903 and continues today with offshore rigs. Peat, too, proved the basis for a short-lived iron-making industry at Normandale, west of Port Dover, and for one of Canada’s largest peat-extraction industries near Port Colborne.
A New Day Dawns
As the pall of the Second World War receded, major changes began to sweep the Erie shore. This was heralded largely by the arrival of the auto age. While a few cars coughed along the dusty roads of the Erie shore as early as 1900, the postwar years ushered in an overwhelming alteration in lifestyle, industry, and transportation.
By the time the war ended, most of the radial streetcars had been shunted into scrapyards, and the tracks were lifted. A new Welland Canal, completed in the 1930s, was bringing ever-larger boats