McLean Brothers Fisheries Company records

The turn of the twentieth century witnessed a rapid growth in commercial fishing centered in Ontario's Lake Erie ports. Founded in ca. 1895, Enoch McLean and Son began operations at Wheatley, Ontario in the western end of the lake near the Pelee Peninsula. This company became known as McLean Brothers Fisheries by the 1920s.

The McLean company began as a principal pound net operation for Ontario. Construction of rail lines such as the Tillsonburg, Lake Erie and Pacific Railroad in the 1890s allowed Canadian fishing companies to rapidly ship their catch to distributors. The boom of the 1890s and early 1900s was sparked in large measure by the herring catch. In 1904 a record harvest for herring was noted at 2,644,300 pounds. Records for the fishing industry showed 648 men licensed in the Canadian Lake Erie fisheries in 1904. Increasingly large catches were making substantial incomes available to these men.

George McLean's company in the 1920s followed the trend toward use of steam tugs as replacements for pound nets to improve efficiency of operations. Survival depended on successful economizing in order to meet the competition from other companies.

Increased use of local markets for sale of products was recognized as desirable in efforts to keep greater profits in Canadian hands. In the 1890s the New York City-based Peek Slip Market bought most of the Lake Erie catch and paid the fishing companies a fixed rate determined in annual contracts. The price established by Peek Slip was often subject to change at the expense of the Canadians' fee. Spoilage was often cited as the reason for cutting the share received by McLean Brothers.

Increased mechanization in processing plants in Wheatley and other ports allowed the Canadians to pull away from Peek Slip's control of the market. Large freezing and filleting plants prepared a product that could be shipped by rail quickly to other markets besides New York, eliminating spoilage and forcing buyers to make competitive offers to fishermen.

The McLean Brothers Fisheries company was part of the long term trend on the Great Lakes that saw the dominance in the fishing market of the United States over Canada begin to diminish from 1900 to 1970. Around 1900 the United States harvested 80% of the overall annual catch. This figure stayed around 75% until 1950. The United States portion of the Great Lakes is about 64% of the total. One can see the disproportionate share of the harvest obtained by the United States fishing companies. By 1970 a change had occurred to where 40% of the harvest came from Canada's 36% of the Great Lakes.

The career of fishing companies such as McLean Brothers marked a stable component of Ontario's economy for most of the twentieth century. The Lake Erie fishing industry of the early 1900s was concentrated in the western basin. Despite periodic shifts eastward, the western basin remained the focus of Canadian fishing in Lake Erie. The western Lake Erie fisheries are as relatively important today in Ontario's economy as they were in the 1880s or 1890s. Wheatley, Ontario is reportedly the largest freshwater fish-processing center in the world.