Ghosts of Canada’s industrial past – The abandoned Bowmanville Goodyear Plant

August 2025

Since the early 2000s, the manufacturing sector in Canada has declined significantly in response to changes in the global economy and fewer regulatory controls over Canadian produced products. In Bowmanville, a large brown brick building, once owned by Goodyear Tire Company, silently stands like a tombstone to a manufacturing past that is likely to never return.

When the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company opened their Bowmanville plant in 1910, it was their first plant outside America, twelve years after their founding in Akron, Ohio. This new factory was built on the property of the former Durham Rubber Company, which had operated a plant on the property since 1897. Some of the 150 employees hired by Goodyear were former Durham Rubber employees, while others were farmers who worked over the winter when their farming responsibilities were reduced.

The average starting salary in 1910 was 12 cents an hour for production workers, 22 cents an hour for supervisors, and 27 cents an hour for tire builders, salaries that were considered to be quite good for the time.

At one time, Goodyear was Bowmanville’s biggest industrial employer, with as many as 2,200 working at the plant during its peak during World War 2, when the production lines made heels and soles for soldier’s boots, Bren gun clips, tarpaulin straps, mud flaps for field gun carriers and hoses, belts and gaskets. Two million feet of fire hose in 50-foot lengths were produced to help fight the fires resulting from German air attacks on London, England.

The Bowmanville plant was later owned by Veyance Technologies, which produced conveyor belts for Goodyear and for mining, coal and oil sands operations. In 2015, ContiTech Continental acquired Veyance Technologies, taking over the Bowmanville plant. By this time, the plant was facing the end.

On 30 June 2016, ContiTech shut the down 106-year-old plant, a move it attributed to a decline in global mining activity, the major markets for the conveyor belts made in Bowmanville at the time, and a resulting overcapacity in conveyor belt production among ContiTech’s facilities. At the time, the workforce at the plant numbered about 100 workers.

The property is currently owned by Karmina Developments, who have plans to demolish most of the existing buildings in favour of a mixed-use development called Goodyear Village. Three structures, the cement house (building 27), the powerhouse (building 1) and the chimney stack, are to be preserved and designated under the Heritage Act, as a part of the Municipality of Clarington’s approval of the redevelopment.

Sources: Former Goodyear plant in Bowmanville to be demolished, Contaminated soil at former Goodyear plant has Bowmanville residents concerned | INdurham, Former Goodyear plant closes, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company – Wikipedia.