Dain City, Ontario
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Dain City is a small suburb located at the southern-most part of Welland, Ontario, Canada. At one time, it was a mostly self-contained rural community at the junction of two significant rail lines, part of the Township of Humberstone, and was called Welland Junction. The name was changed to Dain City after it was annexed to the city of Welland in the mid-1950s. Dain City was built for, and by, the Dain Manufacturing Company ( Now known as John Deere ), the main employer in the area, as a "company town".
The geography and character of Dain City is largely a factor of its proximity to the Welland Canal, the only shipping channel between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie in the Great Lakes system. For many years, the canal ran along Dain City's western side and through the city of Welland itself, with numerous bends and bridges along the way. Those included two lift bridges in Dain City, one for trains and the other for car traffic. The completion of the Welland By-Pass in 1973, a massive six-year excavation project to by-pass the whole city of Welland with a wider and straighter channel, significantly altered and isolated Dain City, turning it into a peninsula with the new canal on its eastern side and the old and new canals meeting at the its southern tip.
Dain City's lift bridge's lift capabilities were removed in the 1980s, although it is still in use by vehicular traffic.
Notably, Dain City was once home to a large drive-in theater, the Welland Drive-In, located on the south side of Forks Road between the old rail line and the new canal, constructed in 1954 and torn down in 1981.
Dain City contains four housing subdivisions: "Glennwood Park", "Regatta Park", "Seaway Village", and "Welland Junction". The old canal, renamed the Welland Recreational Waterway, hosts international rowing regattas and dragon boat races annually.
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In 1908, Joseph Dain of the Dain Manufacturing Company (Iowa) purchased two hundred and fifty acres of land east of the Welland Canal between Humberstone and Crowland Township line. The town awarded a ten-year assessment of $10,000 and, in December of that year, Dain Manufacturing Company Limited in Welland was chartered. The company based its growth on manufacturing new hay handling equipment developed and patented by Joseph Dain in 1882. Dain Manufacturing also produced grain binders, corn binders, and disk tillers, seeding attachments for disk tillers, disk harrows, field cultivators and Dain mowers.
Joseph Dain chose the location for his Canadian plant for its strategic advantages. The Welland area is located within five hundred miles of 60% of the population of the United States and 80% of Canada’s population. An important railroad network serving the United States and Canada services it. These rail lines included the New York Central, Michigan Central, Toronto, Hamilton and Buffalo, Wabash Railroad, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific. Highway transportation provided a network of facilities for convenient travel to all parts of the continent. The proximity to the Welland Canal provided for the economical shipment of products to customers.
In 1909, Dain City was named for the company because of the subdivision of the land adjacent to the plant for its employees to build houses. On April 7th of the following year the Dain Manufacturing Company Limited opened. In May, the manufacturing of the Success Spreader (under patent held by Kemp and Burpee Manufacturing Company, Syracuse, New York) began. By August 1910, the company entered the export market, shipping hay balers to South America.
In 1911, Deere and Company bought out Dain Manufacturing Company Limited. At the time, executives at John Deere still considered plow manufacturing to be the company's core business. Horses, oxen and mules were still considered the main source of power on American farms. But a dramatic shift was occurring elsewhere – the automobile industry was expanding and farmers were buying cars and learning about the advantages of the internal combustion engine. Joseph Dain was the driving force behind the All Wheel Drive Tractor. After the death of Joseph Dain, questions about the survival of the John Deere tractor business surfaced. The company's Board of Directors moved ahead by authorizing the manufacture of at least one hundred All-Wheel-Drive Tractors as soon as possible. Despite the quality and usefulness demonstrated in the AWD tractor, its list price of $1,500 was still considered too high. In 1917, as World War I continued in Europe, John Deere began producing wartime equipment instead of tractors.
Dain City, located in the south of the city of Welland where the Welland Recreational Waterway and the Welland By-Pass meet, is separated by the massive approaches to the Townline Tunnel required to provide the low grade for the rail lines that use the tunnel. Technically, both the east side of Welland and Dain City are peninsulas, surrounded by the waters of the old and new channels of the Welland Canal and connected to "solid" ground only by the relatively small plug in the old canal along the Townline Tunnel approaches.
