Located halfway up the Bruce Peninsula, not far from the eastern shores of Lake Huron, Tiverton, Ontario is right smack in the center of “cow country”. The lush fields and green pastures of Bruce County really do belong to the cows – there’s over 163,000 of these animals living on 3,750 farms. In fact Bruce County is ranked number one in the entire province for cattle; it produces 7.6 percent of Ontario’s beef and over 80,000 kilograms of milk per year. That’s probably because over 62% of the county is farmed and the soil here is some of the best in the world.

But you know it wasn’t always like this. Almost every farmer growing crops today had a grandfather or a great grandfather who had to work hard chopping down trees, clearing the family plot.

Nothing but unbroken forest greeted Timothy Allan when he first settled in Tiverton in the fall of 1850. Any fool could see the soil here was excellent. After several years of back-breaking labor he cleared himself a sizable piece and set an example for a half dozen other settlers who followed. In 1857 Norman McInnes opened a general store in what was then called St. Andrews. When Canada Post came along in 1860 they changed the town’s name to Tiverton because there was already a St. Andrews in Nova Scotia.

Tiverton thrived right from the beginning. McInnes, the storekeeper and postmaster, started a potash and pearl ash factory in his back yard. For people who don’t know what this is, let me explain; potash is an impure form of potassium carbonate (K2CO3) mixed with other potassium salts. Potash is made by collecting and boiling the ashes of hardwood trees.

Pearl ash is created by cooking and further refining the potash. The first patent ever issued by the U.S. Patent Office was awarded to Samuel Hopkins in 1790 for an improved method of making pearl ash. Today this industry is almost completely obsolete, but one hundred and fifty years ago pearl ash had a myriad of uses which included the manufacture of soap and glass. Its principle application however, was as a detergent for cleaning raw wool – consequently England imported it by the boatload.

Anyway, McInnis probably became a very rich as there were lots of settlers burning trees around Tiverton in the 1870s, and there was a huge demand for pearl ash in the domestic wool trade. We know that Norman McInnes helped finance some nearby saw mills and a grist mill, and his money even helped set up a grain market for local farmers. To this day, the McInnes name still appears on the mailboxes of the largest farms in the area.

With agriculture being so prevalent in Tiverton, it’s surprising that the town has become famous for something else – energy. By some strange coincidence this small community has become a huge energy hot spot. For no good reason there’s three distinctly different energy production centers located in and around the municipality.

Bruce station is the largest nuclear facility in Canada with eight CANDU reactors and a total output of 6,232 MW (net). When construction began in 1970 it must have put Tiverton on the map – the map of enemy targets at which the Soviets aimed their long range intercontinental ballistic missiles in the Cold War! Thank god those days are over.

http://www.brucepower.com/pagecontentU12.aspx?navuid=29

Ontario’s first commercial wind farm, called “Huron Wind” is also located near Tiverton. The wind farm consists of five 1.8-megawatt wind turbines that supply enough electricity to power three thousand homes on an annual basis. Monitored remotely, the turbines spin approximately 95 percent of the time, producing variable amounts of electricity corresponding to the power of the wind. The turbines are 117 meters tall from ground to blade peak.

http://www.huronwind.com/huronwind/

Tiverton, Ontario also boasts an ethanol plant which has been fermenting corn and distilling ethyl alcohol here since 1989. Because the Tiverton plant is a batch processing plant, which means corn is processed in “batches”, this is also where GreenField Ethanol’s research and development initiatives take place.

http://www.greenfieldethanol.com/index.php?v=1&p=3&i=28&t=Template6Plants

GreenField Ethanol produces 26 million liters of fuel ethanol and industrial grade alcohol at the Tiverton facility every year. The managers buy local corn and send wet distillers grains back to the feedlots in and around the area. Remember those 163,000 cows? That means there will always be a demand for distillers grains in Bruce County.

Timothy Allen couldn’t have guessed back in the autumn of 1850 that the farm he was clearing would become part a settlement which would slowly grow into a Canadian energy hot spot.