Most people find the subject of gravel pits to be a rather mundane and boring one.
Nevertheless, gravel extraction has been a part of local industrial history since the earliest days of settlement, and is a part of our local history. Today, gravel pits have become a very contentious political and environmental issue. More to the point, no one wants the extraction to take place anywhere near their residence.
The geology of Wellington County and adjoining counties is relatively new. When the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age they left deposits of sand, gravel and stones on the surface of the land, in deposits of various sizes and types.
Those deposits were a valuable resource to the pioneering generations, providing aggregate for mortar, field stones for houses and foundations, and gravel for roads and fill. Due to its weight and mass the pioneers did not want to haul gravel any farther than necessary. That resulted in small gravel pits all over the countryside during the 19th century. Most operated with only the minimum of equipment: gangs of men with shovels, tossing the gravel onto horse-drawn wagons. Today, many farms have the remnant of an old gravel pit.
Railway construction in the 1870s changed the scale of gravel operations. Railways needed vast quantities of gravel for ballast beneath the track to permit quick drainage, preventing shifting track and frost damage. More gravel was used to build embankments and fills over depressions and valleys.
After construction, railways continued to use great quantities of gravel to make improvements and repairs to their track. For example, the Great Western (later the Grand Trunk and then Canadian National), on the Guelph-to-Elora line, opened a track-side gravel pit at Lot 2, Concession 5 of Pilkington, and another pit just north of the Marden station. The latter continued to operate into the 1950s.
As well as supplying themselves, the railways found that the trackside pits supplied them with a steady, though low value, stream of traffic, hauling gravel to points that were not so well endowed with local sources of gravel.
That led to the expansion of the pits exploiting some of the better deposits. Interestingly, until the more recent large-scale pits in Puslinch, none of those big pits were in Wellington County, but several were close, such as those near Orangeville, and the large pits at Limehouse, near Acton, and at the south end of Durham.
The latter supplied much of the gravel used to construct the original Toronto subway. It went to the Queen City by the trainload in the early 1950s. The bulk of the gravel from the large pits of that era moved by rail.
Meanwhile, small pits continued to be opened to supply strictly local needs. Most of those were operated only briefly, supplying a contractor working on a nearby stretch of road. There is no official record of most of those pits. The industry was, until recent decades, completely unregulated.
Contractors, and sometimes municipalities, would sign an agreement with a farmer to open a pit. Later, some of those pits became convenient sites for dumps. There were no regulations pertaining to groundwater contamination, drainage, digging below the water table, or site restoration after the extraction of the gravel.
In December of 1928, a group of businessmen from Detroit and Toronto formed a company to extract gravel from a pit to be opened in Guelph Township. At the time, the site was out in the country, but today it is on the north side of the Royal City’s industrial basin. After some initial surveys in the area where the Canadian National track crossed the Canadian Pacific, the company signed options on some 450 acres of land adjoining the railway lines.
The firm planned to exploit the gravel on a large scale, and ship it by the trainload to the northern American states that had aggressive road-building programs but few local sources of gravel. As well, commercial and industrial buildings increasingly used concrete in their construction. By building near two railways, the company would not be a captive customer of one railway.
The equipment to be used, including power shovels, screens, stone crushers, and conveyors would be powered by electricity. In January 1929 they entered negotiations for an agreement with Ontario Hydro for 1,200 horsepower. That would make the pit by far the largest electrical consumer in Wellington County.
Through the spring of 1929 the company, headed by a man named Col. Van Buccho of Detroit, continued the test holes that had begun the previous fall. By that point in history, the quality and characteristics of the gravel were important, in regard to particle size, drainage qualities, and proportion and size of stone.
The company planned to excavate deeply, creating a large pit that would partially fill with water. The screening equipment would be on an island in the middle of the lake. Power shovels would eat away at the walls of the pit, and conveyors would transport the gravel to the island and its equipment for processing. Water in the pit would be used to wash the gravel, removing and contamination of topsoil and vegetation remnants.
Other conveyors would take the gravel from that island for direct loading into hopper and gondola cars, or into stockpiles. Gravel from those piles could be further processed with the addition of crushed stone before shipping.
The railways expressed enthusiasm for the proposed pit. Both offered to construct sidings to hold cars and to load them using the pit’s conveyor system.
The details of Van Buccho’s company are something of a mystery. He claimed that he was backed by several bankers in Detroit, and that his firm’s engineering expertise came from a couple of Toronto-based engineers. Interestingly, Van Buccho never talked to Guelph Township council. That body only knew what it read in the newspapers.
Not surprisingly, they read the stories with a little apprehension. Council wondered whether the company planned to use Guelph Township roads, and if so, would the equipment they moved cause damage and increase maintenance costs. There were also local concerns regarding changes to the water table, and possible impacts on agriculture.
Those concerns sound very much like some of the objections to new gravel pits being expressed today, more than 80 years later. There were other objections voiced as well. A couple of letter writers to newspapers objected to yet more resources being exported to the United States.
The Guelph Mercury itself had objections to the plans, noting that Ontario was in the midst of a rapid expansion of its road and highway system. Ontario should be wary of shipping gravel out of province by the trainload because it would eventually become scarce here.
Van Buccho and his associates continued to make tests into the early summer of 1929, but after that there was little activity and no public announcements. Several factors may have been caused the demise of the plans. The company might have run into financial difficulties. They may have decided that they could not ship into the American market competitively. Or they may have found another source that could be developed at less cost or that contained gravel that had better characteristics.
And, of course, the depression that began over the winter of 1929-1930 would have spelled the postponement if not the demise of an ambitious scheme such as this one.
Still, it is a source of amusement to speculate on what impact this operation might have made on our local history.