W.H. Wheeler Fish 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. 1900, the W. H. Wheeler Fish Company began operations at Selkirk, Ontario in the eastern basin of Lake Erie.

Construction of rail lines such as the Tillsonburg, Lake Erie and Pacific Railroad in the 1890s permitted fishing companies on the Canadian shore to rapidly distribute their processed catches to cities in the United States and Canada. Companies such as Wheeler found the years around 1900 opportune moments to begin commercial sales of fish due to the increased ease of reaching large urban markets.

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 Canadian 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.

The growth in numbers for fishing companies meant competition became more intense. The Wheeler company followed other fishing interests in moving toward greater use of steam tugs in the 1920s to retrieve nets. Less reliance on pound net fishing resulted.

As the fishing companies became more cost conscious, they looked for ways to keep more profit for their harvests in their own hands. In the 1890s, the New York City-based Peek Slip Market bought most of the Lake Erie catch from the Canadian fishing companies in annual contracts paying fixed rate prices. These prices were often subject to reductions when Peek Slip agents said the fish arrived in New York with too much spoilage. The fishermen could not verify if this was really the case.

Companies such as W. H. Wheeler began to build freezing and filleting plants of their own to avoid dealing with markets using fixed rate contracts. The better preserved fish could be sent by rail to customers of the Wheeler Company's selection who paid competitive prices.

The W. H. Wheeler Fishing 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 surface area. 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 W. H. Wheeler marked a stable component of Ontario's economy for most of the twentieth century. The Lake Erie fisheries are as relatively important to Ontario's financial picture as they were a century ago. Wheatley, Ontario, was reportedly one of the largest freshwater fish-processing center in the world.