An interesting chapter in our local industrial history was the attempt in the 1930s to establish a lignite industry in the Luther Marsh.
For decades many people had dreamed of putting the vast peat bogs there to commercial use. Not until the 1930s did any serious efforts see the light of day. Several operations went beyond the planning stage, and at least one went into production on a limited scale.
The use of peat as a fuel was common in Europe, but much less so in North America. The Canadian government underwrote an experimental operation in the Ottawa Valley in the late 19th century, and investigated the subject again during World War I. There were fears that central Canada had become too dependent on American coal for heating and for railway locomotives. Canada had ample coal in the Nova Scotia and Alberta, but those sources were too far away to from Ontario markets.
The search for Ontario sources of fuel emerged again in the 1930s. The Ontario government, aware of the vast quantities of muskeg in the north of the province, made efforts to develop that resource. The provincially-owned Temiskaming & Northern Ontario Railway experimented with lignite-fuelled locomotives. Those trials were not successful: peat burned at a low temperature, and could not generate sufficient heat to supply the demands of the locomotives for high-pressure steam.
Serious investigation of the Luther Marsh began in 1937. Chemical analysis of various samples showed that the peat had a high percentage of combustible material, plus trace elements that could be useful in various industrial processes. Using newly developed techniques, one expert claimed, it was possible to extract about 200 gallons of synthetic crude oil from a ton of dried peat. But others doubted those claims. As well, there was a huge market for peat moss as a soil amendment for gardens and farms.
Early in 1937 a company named Industrial Compounds Ltd was incorporated in Toronto. The firm obtained a tract of 550 acres northwest of Grand Valley. The following spring the firm brought in equipment, and with a crew of about 20 men began to extract peat for processing.
In harvesting the peat, the plant used water from the original Luther Lake. The company dug a one-mile canal to bring the lake water to the peat extraction site.
Large nozzles, fed by a pump and aimed at the peat, turned it into a watery slurry, which was pumped into one of seven large settling ponds, each 350 by 60 feet, and above the general ground level. At that point the slurry was 90% water, much of which drained from the peat and returned to the canal, to be reused or returned to the lake.
When the water content had lowered, operators opened the gates to the settling ponds, and the slurry drained, with some assistance, into one of seven drying fields. After two days the peat was cut into blocks four by six inches, and then left to dry further, usually two weeks, depending on weather conditions, until the moisture content dropped to the 15% range.
The heat content of the dried peat was about 20% less that of coal per unit of weight. The capacity of the operation was set at 20,000 tons of dried peat per year.
Not all that amount was destined for fuel. The equipment included a grinder and silo that stored dried peat for agricultural uses.
The engineer and project manager for the pilot plant was Ovend Thomsen, a German born engineer of Danish extraction, with an obsession for the commercial exploitation of peat. He told reporters that he refused to sell his patents to larger companies, preferring to develop them himself for the benefit of the public. He claimed that he and his family lived on less that he was paying his workmen in order to stretch the available capital as far as possible.
Thomsen and his investors had, by the end of August 1938, expended about $30,000 on equipment and salaries. Much of that was spent in Grand Valley, and provided a welcome boost to the local economy, still suffering from the effects of the depression.
Thomsen geared his operation to supply peat for a variety of uses, of which domestic heating fuel was only one. During the summer he and his investors purchased a plant in Grand Valley and installed equipment to distill peat by-products such as ethylene, superheater units, and equipment that allowed the fractional distillation of peat – in essence, a miniature oil refinery. He claimed that he had contracts to supply some $600,000 of ethylene and synthetic oil.
The ideas of Ovend Thomsen to use the peat bogs of Luther as the source of raw material for a local petro-chemical industry was rather esoteric, and excited only a few of the locals. A reliable local source of heating fuel had much more popular appeal. And it was the potential of fuel sales that inspired at least one other small firm that summer.
Doing business as Montgomery & Dickson, the partners began experimenting in the summer of 1937. A year later they were ready to supply peat fuel. Their first customer was Joe Wilson, of Arthur, who bought a ton of it in August 1938.
Their equipment was more modest than that used by Thomsen. An old Star stationary engine powered a machine that cut the peat out of the bog, and another squeezed the resulting product, which was then broken into stove-size portions and put onto large racks to dry for at least two weeks.
This was a small-scale operation capable of turning out eight tons of fuel in a 10-hour work day. The partners insisted that the peat potential of the Luther Marsh was much smaller than others had claimed. They placed the area of commercially-exploitable peat at about 100 acres.
Montgomery & Dickson claimed that their peat equalled coke in its burning qualities, and produced neither smoke nor clinkers. Their price, delivered in Grand Valley, Mount Forest, or Arthur, at $7 per ton, bettered that of competitive fuels by at least $4 per ton. Those numbers, though, should be considered carefully. A ton of peat could not produce the quantity of heat available from a ton of coke, and peat burned at a much lower temperature and more slowly than coke or coal.
Traditional fire boxes were too small and inefficient to use the alternative peat fuel effectively.
In the fall of 1938 Montgomery & Dickson announced that they would not be in production for 1939. The reason they gave was that the Grand River Conservation Commission was planning to build a dam near Waldemar that would flood a large portion of the Luther Marsh, including the site of their peat fuel operation. They hinted that they had to cancel plans to produce on a much larger scale in 1939, and had been encouraged by the demand for their product in the 1938 season.
After a flurry of newspaper articles in 1938, peat production in the Luther Marsh drops from the historical record. The prospect of a local fuel generated much interest for a few months, with accounts of activities near Grand Valley appearing in the Toronto dailies, the London Free Press, and a couple of national magazines. Then the story seems to disappear.
As well, Thomsen and his Industrial Compounds Ltd seem to have faded away in 1939.
Part of the enthusiasm for Luther peat no doubt derived from the fact that it might push an imported product–American coal – off the market.
Nevertheless, as a fuel it was inferior to coal in its heat content and burning qualities, and its production was only commercially viable due to the very low wages prevailing in the late 1930s in East and West Luther.
Some of the old families from that the Luther area may have documents that might shed some more light on this part of our industrial history. Perhaps there are one or two who were employed at the plants, and others who tried to burn peat in their furnaces. Their stories would make interesting reading and shed further light on this part of our history.