Dominion Coal and Wood

DOMINION COAL AND WOOD LIMITED

[This article was copied from an issue of The Metropolitan Toronto Business Journal held in the Business Library at the University of Western Ontario. The original article should be consulted since this copy may contain some errors. The text and the image are being made available to researchers for scholarly purposes. They should not be used for commercial gain without the permission of the author or publisher.]

"Landmarks: Stoking Dominion's Silos", by Frank Rasky, Metropolitan Toronto Business Journal. Vol, 75, No.1, Jan/Feb 1985.

Silhouetted like prairie grain elevators, the nine orange, green and black silos stab 80 feet into the city sky at the southwest corner of Mt. Pleasent Road and Merton Street. The last of their kind still standing in Toronto, these anachronisms are retail coal silos, still bearing their original 72-year-old logo, Dominion Coal and Wood Limited.
To be sure, things aren't quite the same as they used to be at what is now Dominion Coal-Building Supplies Ltd. Sales of coal and firewood account for only two percent of the company's $6 million annual gross sales, and the one-acre "coalyard," as it's still called, is stacked mostly with building supplies.
However, three of the concrete silos, with a capacity of 350 tons each, continue to serve a core of old-fashioned customers from Orangeville, Oakville, and outlying farms. Some have been coming to Dominion for half a century, and they still come to fuel up their fireplaces, hot-air furnaces, and potbellied Quebec stoves with firewood and coal, which now sells for $200 a ton. Three other silos are being renovated so that the lower portions can be used to store tools, gravel, fencing, insulation, plumbing supplies, and patio ornaments.
Acknowledging that the Toronto Historical Board had officially listed the silos as buildings "of architectural and historical importance," 55-year-old president Jim Spring likes the thought of preserving them for their symbolic value. To him, they evoke memories of a simpler, down-to-earth mercantile era, when a man's handshake could be trusted as a contract. Spring's family- owned firm dates back to November, 1912, when his father, George James Spring, a flinty, enterprising son of a cockney CNR brakeman, borrowed $1,00 from an uncle, William Henry Smith, a Queen Street haberdasher. With this capital, he established the company in a white-painted wooden frame shack on Danforth Avenue.
Not much bigger that an outhouse, it was located beside the city's East End railway tracks, which freighted in various kinds of coal from Wales, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Customers either picked up a 70-cent burlap bag stuffed with 140 pounds of coal, or had it delivered by wagon and dumped into their cellars for $6 a ton. Wood, which sold for $6 per cord, was freighted in form North Bay, while six-foot slabs of ice, packed in sawdust, were hacked into 12 square blocks that sold for 25 cents each. Prices are misleading, of course, until you stop to realize that Dominion's delivery men were paid 50 cents and hour and worked a 60-hour, six-day week. For that princely sum, they not only drove the wagons and hauled the goods; they also tended the stable of 2,000 pound Percherons.
As Dominion grew, that stable grew to nine horses and wagons. At the same time, the company also outgrew it's tiny storage are on Danforth Avenue. It opened the Merton Street coal yard in 1929 and, in 1940, set up another facility, with simpler storage bins, at the corner of Dupont Street and Dovercourt Road.
By 1954, however, the Dominion empire seemed doomed. Oil heaters were becoming popular and Toronto's 140 licensed coal dealers started going belly up at an amazing clip in the '50s. But Spring Senior spotted the do-it-yourself home carpentry trend and was quick to exploit the new emerging market. The business not only survived to become the last of Toronto's horse-and-wagon coal, wood, and ice companies; bu supplying building materials to contractors and handymen, it continued to prosper under Spring's tight-fisted reign until he died in 1968 at the age of 78.
In fact, in 1965 Dominion opened up a new head office and store on Gerrard Street East, followed by another East End outlet in 1970. The horse-and-wagons have long since been replaced with a fleet of 20 sleek trucks, and a staff of 60 now works for Jim Spring who is grooming his son, Jake, a 25-year-old accountant in the purchasing department, to take over the business some day.
But it won't be for quite a while. And even then, he won't sanction tearing down the nine venerable silos in the Merton Street coal yard.

"When my father built them 55 years ago, they cost $100,000, and they were considered the best silos in Canada," recalls Spring. "They're the same age and I am, and neither of us is ready to be discarded in the ash heap."