Montreal Walking Tour: Towers of Grain

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Montreal Walking Tour: Towers of Grain

with Jim Clifford and Stéphane Castonguay

16 June 2024 – 7pm EDT – Starting at Victoria Square in Montreal
Register for Walking Tour
Jim Clifford and Stéphane Castonguay will lead a walking tour on Sunday June 16 at 7pm starting at Victoria Square in Montreal. Towers of Grain: Feeding Edwardian Britain Silo number 1, built in 1902 in the Port of Montreal, linked the burgeoning wheat farms on the Prairies with the urban markets in the United Kingdom. New industrial-scale flour mills were built in Birkenhead near Liverpool and West Ham on the eastern edge of London between 1899 and 1905. On the Prairies, Ogilvie Milling Company, the British American Company, Grain Growers’ Grain Company and others built thousands of grain elevators to feed wheat into the railways. Railways and steamships linked these towers together. Settlers and farming in the Canadian Prairies required industrial technology from the start, and this provides an important reminder the Industrial Revolution did not stop at the city limits of Manchester, Glasgow, or Montreal. This walking tour will use digital materials to explore the transnational history of the grain silos in the Port of Montreal and Prairie wheat fields. The tour will commence 7:00pm at the Art Nouveau entrance of the Square-Victoria–OACI metro station. Please register for the free walking tour on Eventbrite. Scroll down on the image below to view the current draft of the digital content developed to accompany the walking tour:
Feature Image: 3D model of Silo number 2
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Jim Clifford

Associate Professor at University of Saskatchewan
Jim Clifford is an associate professor of environmental history at the University of Saskatchewan. He published West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London’s Industrialized Marshland, 1839–1914 with the UBC Press in 2017.

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