Blog posts archive

Golf's Steak House opened in 1976, at 598 Lancaster St. W. in Kitchener. The building was designed by W.H. Breithaupt in 1903, and was originally occupied by the Bridgeport Casino. Special Collections & Archives also holds the blueprints for the casino.

In 1854, William Brown, Ashley Hibbard and George Bourn met in Montreal to start Brown, Hubbard, Bourn & Co., the first manufacturer of Caoutchouc (Indian rubber) footwear in Canada. Several mergers and acquisitions later, they became the Dominion Rubber Company in 1910, and in 1912 built the Dominion Tire factory in Berlin (now Kitchener) to meet the new demand for automobile tires.

In 1943, with the Second World War raging, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce began (rather optimistically) to plan for the coming peace, and they invited the Waterloo and Kitchener Boards of Trade to participate in an experimental fact-finding survey of Waterloo County (now Waterloo Region), to determine "economic facts about the past and present and the expectations of the future in their district".¹

In 1871, the Ontario Pharmacy Act was passed, establishing the Ontario College of Pharmacy.

Special Collections & Archives is currently under way with a bold new plan to barcode all of our materials (as the main library did in 1977). This project will ultimately give us greater control over our holdings both in terms of space available for new collections and also in terms of allowing us to better track the use of our collections.

While this is exciting enough on its own, co-op student Eva Lau discovered some material in an archival box that had been uncatalogued.

In 1923, the first specimen (a molar) of a new human ancestor was found in Zhoukoudian, near Beijing, China. Many more fossils were found in the area, and Canadian paleontologist Davidson Black named this new ancestor Sinanthropus pekinensis, "Peking Man" (after the city of Beijing, spelled Peking before the Pinyin romanization system was adopted. The city was also known as Beiping or Peiping from 1928 to 1949). Today Sinanthropus is considered to be an example of Homo erectus.

Walter Crane (1845-1915) was an English artist and book illustrator, one of the most influential and prolific children's book creators of his generation. He was part of the Arts and Crafts movement, and produced a wide variety of materials, including a number of iconic images for the  Socialist League.

For the past year Special Collections & Archives has been working to provide better access to our women’s studies collections through redescribing and digitizing the materials, as well as making our finding aids for these collections available online.

Special Collections & Archives also holds the University Archives. This gem is a library publication from 1982, showing the many steps involved in doing research before the Internet changed everything.