MADE IN HAMILTON
20TH CENTURY
INDUSTRIAL TRAIL

SITE 33
AMERICAN CAN COMPANY, 1904
TREBOR ALLAN INC.

If you look east along the railway tracks near the corner of Victoria Avenue and Birge Street you can see the old red brick plant of the American Can Company. You can get a closer look at this building by turning right down Shaw Street after you visit the site of the Cataract Power Company.

In 1904, the American Can Company of Greenwich, Connecticut bought the small Norton Can Company which had operated since 1887 at York and Bay Streets. The company expanded further in 1908 when it bought the Sanitary Can Company of Niagara Falls and the Acme Can Works in Montreal. The company soon outgrew its downtown plant and in 1911 built a new larger factory here at Shaw and Emerald Streets. For many years, the American Can Company was Canada's largest producer of tin cans. The company purchased much of the tinplate for its local canning operations from Stelco and Dofasco.

In 1959, the company began moving its operations to the former Sawyer-Massey plant a few blocks away. The company briefly came under Canadian ownership in 1984, when it was purchased by the Toronto-based Onex Packaging Inc. Since 1988, the Victoria Avenue plant has operated as Ball Packaging Products Canada, a subsidiary of the Ball Corporation of Muncie, Indiana. Until 1998 workers at this plant were organized into one of the few independent unions still directly chartered to the Canadian Labour Congress.

Workers at this plant are organized as CAW Local 354, Hamilton Can Workers' Union.