Foundry Street: A Ghost Street that time Erased

By Connie Carson

Looking back at our city’s history, and old maps, we find streets that no longer exist.

They’ve been erased by time, swallowed by new buildings, or forgotten after fires and floods. Ghost Streets are roads that have vanished from today’s maps but still appear in old surveys and in the city’s memory.

One of the first is Foundry Street. Once alive with sawdust, clattering wagons, and the steady hammer of iron, it has disappeared from Belleville’s newer maps.

Yet on the old city plans, it lingers as a Ghost Street and was once a driving force of Belleville’s growing industrial sector.

On the corner of Foundry and Church Street stood Tickell & Sons Furniture Factory, a solid brick, three storey landmark where George S. Tickell and his two sons produced furniture of unparalleled quality.

Their finely crafted pieces included everything from sofas and tables to cabinets and caskets.They were shipped to homes across Ontario and Quebec, earning a reputation for workmanship that endured for
decades.

Tickell, our mayor for awhile, also owned the Bedford-Tickell block, housing a retail store at 275-277 Front Street and gifted it to the City of Belleville for use as the Ontario Public Headquarters Commission.

The oddly shaped Greenleaf Foundry opened in 1889 and operated into the 1930s. Part-foundry and part-machine shop, Greenleaf turned out ornamental ironwork, machinery parts, and even experimented
with the emerging technology of electric light and telephones.

But Foundry Street’s largest enterprise had roots even earlier. In 1846, G. & J. Brown established a major foundry that became one of Belleville’s biggest employers with 75 to 100 women and men working there.

The foundry produced hoisting equipment, engines, boilers, smokestacks, tanks, and winches. Sold in 1897 to Marsh & Henthorn Ltd., the works carried on the tradition of heavy industry well into the new century.

For decades, these three enterprises gave Foundry Street its backbone. Workers in flat caps streamed in and out, wagons groaned under heavy loads, and the air was thick with smoke, sawdust, and ambition.

By the mid-20th century, the bustle had faded. Tickell’s factory closed, Greenleaf’s hammers fell silent, and the boilers at Marsh & Henthorn were shut down.

By the 1960s the buildings were demolished and Foundry Street itself was erased, leaving not even a footprint on the modern city grid.

Today the land tells another story. For more than fifty years, the Post Office stood on the site, and now Belleville Service Canada Centre at Pinnacle and Station Street occupies most of the ground where wagons once clattered and forges roared.

The smoke and hammering have been replaced by paperwork and passports.

But if you stand near our historic double bowstring Upper Bridge on Front and close your eyes, you may still catch the faint clang of a hammer, the creak of wagon wheels, and the whisper of industry that once defined a vanished street.

Foundry Street may be gone, but its spirit endures in the memory of a city built on iron and ambition.