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Industry once helped define Sackville while serving global market
Sackville is loud for a quiet little town.
With a population of about 5,000, it’s situated at the edge of the windswept Tantramar Marshes, which are named for an old Acadian word referring to the noisy flocks of birds passing through.
Until the end of the last century, sounds of not only waterfowl but industry reverberated across the wetlands from Sackville’s crown jewel, the Enterprise Foundry.
A Canadian leader in manufacturing cast iron stoves and then electric appliances, the factory employed 400 local people at its peak, breathing economic life to the region.
Eighty-nine-year-old Lewis Estabrooks smiled as his gentle voice recalled 30 years working at the foundry.
Workers were not paid by the hour but instead by how many stoves they produced, “and that was always a thing to watch because the hammers were flying and everything, every machine was making noises, so it was a busy, busy spot,” Estabrooks said.
“There was always noise, noise all the time at the foundry. You could walk through it, and you got all kinds of different things going on as you walked through the plants.”
Today, the foundry property is bustling in a different way.
Dump trucks clatter as they make trips back and forth down a dusty, potholed road carrying away loads of rubble.
Brick walls vibrate the ground as they tumble at the hand of heavy equipment, and massive metal roofing beams let out final, loud groans that tear across the marsh as excavators rip them out.
The Enterprise Foundry is being demolished.
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At its height, the foundry consisted of about 30 buildings on the southern outskirts of town by the train station.
Originally known as the Dominion Foundry Company in 1872, it was renamed Enterprise Foundry Company in 1888 and operated continuously until its bankruptcy in the 1980s.
The buildings were sold and became the Enterprise Fawcett Foundry, which dwindled over the next few decades, despite efforts by new owners to revitalize it.
Production fell drastically, and the foundry underwent several controversial union strikes before a final death blow was dealt.
Just one year after a roof collapsed under heavy snow,
a large fire heavily damaged the foundry in 2012.
Enterprise was shut down for good that same year and sold to Bowsers’ Construction, a Sackville company that has owned it ever since and is now demolishing the buildings.
Alan Atkinson, a Bowsers’ employee, said the buildings had simply become unsafe.
“So it’s best just to clean up the property and move on,” he said, adding that one of the buildings would likely remain.
Susan Amos has written a 200-page book,
Foundries of Sackville NB, which tells the history of the foundries and stories of former workers, including some who died of disease and others who lied about their age to get jobs at Enterprise.
“It’s just sad that we never figured out how to save it,” she said.
During its 150 years, the Enterprise foundry offered a good standard of living, Amos said, “because it was steady work, it was relatively well-paid, you didn’t have to have a lot of education to do the work.”
The foundry was was one of two major foundries in Sackville, the other being Fawcett.
“The foundries were Sackville for so many years,” Amos said.
Enterprise was added to Canada’s registry of historic places in 2005. The registry’s website laments that more than 20 per cent of Canada’s historic buildings have been destroyed.
“We need to work together to protect these remaining places,” the website says.
CBC News asked Parks Canada, which administers the registry, what protections are given to buildings on that list and if there are any consequences for a historic property being demolished.
A spokesperson received the request, but has not responded.
Amos said the Tantramar Heritage Centre has been trying to find a way to save the massive, rusty metal press that still stands at the edge of the Enterprise property to turn into a monument in town.
Bowsers’ has also let the society save documents and artifacts from the site before the demolition, she said.
Plaque not enough, researcher says
Robert Summerby-Murray, president of Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, also has a background researching historical geography and industrial heritage and has written about Sackville’s foundries.
He said Enterprise is still well-known for several reasons, including a sense of continuity that came from operating over several generations.
“Another part of its significance is just the reach that it had,” Summerby-Murray said.
“This is not just a local company producing stoves for the Sackville or even the southeast New Brunswick community. This had a global export.”
But if the town commemorates the foundry through monuments, museums, or memory, he said there is a danger with heavy industry to gloss over undesirable aspects of its history such as the environmental impact or challenging labour relations, he said.
“We often find ourselves choosing, making a political decision, about which of those challenges we choose to remember,” Summerby-Murray said.
He said it’s not simply enough to put up a plaque or put an artifact inside a glass case.
“I hope going forward there will be a way to find commemoration that is true to the challenges and opportunities that the Enterprise Foundry brought to Sackville.”
One of the last left to tell a story
With the buildings now being torn down, it’s a bittersweet exercise for the surviving workers to reflect on their time.
“Well, a lot of the people that worked there are gone now,” Estabrooks said. “I’m probably one of the oldest ones that’s still left to tell some kind of a story.”
He started working at age 16, beginning as an enamel sprayer but eventually working in the office for most of his career. Eventually he was in charge of inventory for Enterprise’s dozen warehouses across Canada.
Estabrooks credits the foundry with giving him a decent job for his career, paying for a family house, and putting five children through university.
“I had lots to do, but I enjoyed my work at Enterprise. My boss was always good to me. Never paid enough, but when you’re young and have a family, you’ve got to have a lot to get along.”
Estabrooks said it was a tough day to see the company close its doors.
“To have that shut down was almost like losing part of your family, because that’s where a lot of my family were, down in that area,” Estabrooks said.
“It was sad, in a way, but I guess those things happen.”
Camaraderie and danger
Charles Trenholm worked at Enterprise from 1976 to 1986 as a moulder and still recalls his first time “catching” a ladle of molten hot iron to then carry back to his mould made of sand and pour out what would harden into a cast iron piece for a stove.
The man teaching the new hires had to shout over the playful jeering from the other workers watching these first attempts, he recalled.
“You had this older feller, and all the other people are screaming and hollering at you to make you nervous,” Trenholm said, adding that there was no safety equipment then.
“And finally the older feller gives you a push and says get in there, get in there. And you go in there and catch your first ladle of iron and it’s pretty terrifying at first.”
Despite the dangerous nature of the job, Trenholm said he misses his co-workers, referring to them as brothers.
“My father worked there. My friends worked there. My friends’ fathers worked there. One entire street, just about every one worked in that foundry.”
A prediction that came true
Trenholm’s friend, John Novak, started in 1972 at age 15, and worked a variety of jobs throughout his foundry career.
“It was very good workmanship there. My wife and I were married in ’77, we bought an electric stove there, and we had it over 30 years,” Novak said.
After the stove finally rusted and needed replacing, the couple bought another from a different manufacturer.
“And it lasted four years — big difference,” Novak said.
Reflecting on the life of the foundry coming to an end this year, Novak can’t help but recall advice from a teacher when he first started work at Enterprise.
“She said, ‘John, don’t ever think that foundry’s going to be there forever.’ And I thought, ‘She don’t know what she’s talking about,'” Novak said.
He doubted her, but she was right.
“I didn’t think she would be, but … ,” Novak said as his voice trailed off, the silence speaking for itself.
