In the late 19th century, the Edison General Electric Company from Schenectady, N.Y., was interested in expanding its Canadian operations. Demand for electrical apparatus had swamped a small Edison factory in Sherbrooke, Que., so the search was on for a new facility.
The city of Peterborough expressed an interest in hosting the new facility, offering land, money for construction and utilities.
These included electrical power, still a new thing in many places, but not Peterborough which already had electric street lights and several generating stations along the Otonabee River.
“What they did was dedicate the power plant at Nassau Mills for the Canadian General Electric plant which was being built then off of Park Street to Monaghan,” said Elwood Jones, archivist with Trent Valley Archives.
“It was joined by power lines with went from Nassau mills to that site and it was exclusive for CGE.”
In the 1890s, the Edison General Electric Company, soon renamed the Canadian General Electric Company, had 200 employees. The Peterborough ‘Works’ turned out motors, dynamos, meters, lamps and street cars.
From the beginning, the Canadian General Electric factory workforce was unionized. The first unions were craft unions, grouping together workers that did the same job, like millwright or iron-worker,
The workers gained national attention in 1897 when they went on strike to protest being penalized for damage to materials.
“It was a major deciding point where employers could force workers to pay for materials when they were doing piecework,” said Tara De Blois, a labour history author.
In the days when there were several thousand staff at CGE, management produced what was called The Works News, a weekly newspaper. This enabled staff to learn what was going on in other parts of the plant. It also listed social events, the results of games in the shop sports league and new products being produced.
“We have to remember, at its height, 6,000 people worked at GE and that’s the population of a small town. And so there was a lot of interesting social news, and work-related news that the workers would need to know about and were also interested in,” said Jon Oldham, archivist with the Peterborough Museum and Archives.
The topic of the next instalment of “Lights out: The rise and fall of CGE Peterborough” will be on what was referred to as ‘The Dynamic Decade’