About the booklet
by John Cardiff

American Can Company of Canada Ltd., Simcoe Plant, Leaders in Safety is a 14-page soft cover booklet measuring 7.5-inches by 7.5-inches, published by the company to celebrate the safety record established at the Simcoe plant in 1957. It is primarily a collection of group photos of employees, organized by department.

Our copy was given to employee Bruce Payne and is identified as number 234. The late Bruce Payne and his wife Flo contributed it to this web site. We know of no other surviving copy, although there were presumably about 500 printed. If other copies do survive, they presumably are in the hands of other employees or their descendants, unless donated to an archive.

Scanning published halftones of photographs is problematic at best and rarely results in high quality images, so we have not provided individual head and shoulder photo scans from this source document. Instead, we have tried to do the next best, by providing links to a large scan of each group photo, accessible via both our Intro and Thumbnails web pages. 

There is no indication in the booklet of who took the department photographs reproduced here. Indeed, the only info about the booklet we found was a small back cover notation: "Litho in U.S.A. 1-58"

The American Can Company, a container industry giant, was created in 1901 through the merger of dozens of plants in the United States. The American Can built a huge for Norfolk plant in Simcoe in 1929-1930, on the town block bounded by Robinson, Colborne, Kars and Metcalfe streets, a site that previously included the Union/Central School. 

"The Can" was an dominant factor in the local economy for the next 45 years, employing over 500 on round the clock shifts at its economic peak. During the final decades of the 20th century, American Can diversified, became less important as a local employer, and eventually ceased to exist. The plant was eventually demolished in 2012 to make way for new construction. The exterior shell of the original plant now lives on as the external structure for Norfolk County's new municipal offices.

A separate business, Canadian Canners, was a food processor located immediately east of the American Can in downtown Simcoe. The American Can came to Simcoe in part because the Canadian Canners wanted to get out of the can making business and concentrate on processing locally grown crops.