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Wind in Their Sails

There’s a myriad of attractions to be seen at the century-plus-old Canadian National Exhibition, but one exhibit has year-round appeal combining, as it does, the age-old concept of using wind to do work and the more recent theory of having that same wind generate electricity.

And that’s exactly what the 308-foot-high windmill (technically, its called a wind turbine) at the west end of Exhibition Grounds is doing as its trio of 95-foot-long blades spin at a maximum 21 revolutions per minute. In fact, the electrical output of this one turbine is sufficient to supply the needs of approximately 250 households. Actually, that statement is rather simplistic. What really happens is that the power generated by the Windshare wind turbine is fed into the city’s electrical grid where it helps decrease the total amount of power needed to serve the community. As a result, the more turbines, the fewer kilowatts of power required from other sources. For more details about this interesting project, see the www.trec.on.ca/windshare website.

While the windmill (aka, wind turbine) down at Exhibition Grounds is certainly a newer feature on Toronto’s skyline, it isn’t the city’s first such structure. The honour for that goes to the windmill erected in the fall of 1832 at the edge of Toronto Bay just east of the foot of Parliament Street. That one was made of brick (105,000 of them to be exact), was 70 feet high, and was an important component of new arrival James Worts’s new business enterprise.

Worts had immigrated to York (Toronto) in 1831 from Suffolk, England, in search of a new home for his family as well as for his brother-in-law William Gooderham and offspring. James selected the tiny town of little more than 3,000 souls nestled on the shore of a small bay protected from the often raging waters of Lake Ontario by the curving arm of a peninsula (that, following a fierce storm on April 13, 1858, was transformed into what we now refer to as Toronto Island).

James was familiar with wind-powered gristmills, having operated one back in Suffolk where winds off the North Sea provided the power to turn the sails to grind the grain. Worts was sure that winds off Lake Ontario, caught by fabric sails, would provide the power to turn grinding stones. So he went ahead and built his new wind-powered gristmill on the shoreline at the southeast corner of the town site.

The Windshare wind turbine at Exhibition Place. The 1930 Shriners’ Peace Monument is in the foreground.

With a successful wheat-grinding business now virtually assured, James contacted William back in England and suggested that he and the rest of the Wortses and Gooderhams come to live in York. William agreed, and when the brood arrived in the summer of 1832, the contingent that consisted of family members, servants, and 11 orphans increased the population of little York by a total of 54.

Tragically, just two years after the families had nicely settled in York, James Worts, despondent over his wife’s death during childbirth, ended it all by throwing himself down the company’s well. It was then that William Gooderham brought a nephew into the business, and from then on what had been Worts and Gooderham became Gooderham and Worts.

While the milling business always made money for the young enterprise, by 1837 a better income was being realized from the distilling of surplus and second-grade grain into whiskey. With the sources of most drinking water suspect, whiskey (and beer) were the beverages of choice, both having received some form of sterilization in their manufacture. In short order Gooderham and Worts became the largest distilling operation (and the largest taxpayer) in the entire country.

The Worts and Gooderham windmill on the York (Toronto) shoreline, circa 1832.

Oh, that pioneer windmill — its use was abandoned when the company turned to steam power, and the windmill was demolished in 1858. In 1954 a scaled-down version of the old windmill was erected near the corner of Front and Parliament streets using bricks from a razed structure of the same period. This windmill, too, was destroyed, having been built where a support for the new elevated Gardiner Expressway was planned.

March 2, 2003