Water-power at Niagara Falls to be successfully utilized : its objects, facilities and resources, inducements for manufacturers, etc. /

The lithograph, "General view of lands, tunnel and docks of Niagara River Hydraulic Tunnel, Power and Sewer Company," called for p. [4] in the Index, has been removed and encapsulated, and is shelved separately.

Office of the City Clerk, St. Catharines Records, 1928-1974, n.d.

The site of present-day St. Catharines was settled by 3000 United Empire Loyalists at the end of the 18th century. From 1790, the settlement (then known as "The Twelve") grew as an agricultural community. St. Catharines was once referred to Shipman's Corners after Paul Shipman, owner of a tavern that was an important stagecoach transfer point. In 1815, leading businessman William Hamilton Merritt abandoned his wharf at Queenston and set up another at Shipman's Corners. He became involved in the construction and operation of several lumber and gristmills along Twelve Mile Creek. Shipman's Corners soon became the principal milling site of the eastern Niagara Peninsula. At about the same time, Merritt began to develop the salt springs that were discovered along the river which subsequently gave the village a reputation as a health resort. By this time St. Catharines was the official name of the village; the origin of the name remains obscure, but is thought to be named after Catharine Askin Robertson Hamilton, wife of the Hon. Robert Hamilton, a prominent businessman. Merritt devised a canal scheme from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario that would provide a more reliable water supply for the mills while at the same time function as a canal. He formed the Welland Canal Company, and construction took place from 1824 to 1829. The canal and the mills made St. Catharines the most important industrial centre in Niagara. By 1845, St. Catharines was incorporated as a town, with the town limits extending in 1854. Administrative and political functions were added to St. Catharines in 1862 when it became the county seat of Lincoln. In 1871, construction began on the third Welland Canal, which attracted additional population to the town. As a consequence of continual growth, the town limits were again extended. St. Catharines attained city status in 1876 with its larger population and area. Manufacturing became increasingly important in St. Catharines in the early 1900s with the abundance of hydro-electric power, and its location on important land and water routes. The large increase in population after the 1900s was mainly due to the continued industrialization and urbanization of the northern part of the city and the related expansion of business activity. The fourth Welland Canal was opened in 1932 as the third canal could no longer accommodate the larger ships. The post war years and the automobile brought great change to the urban form of St. Catharines. St. Catharines began to spread its boundaries in all directions with land being added five times during the 1950s. The Town of Merritton, Village of Port Dalhousie and Grantham Township were all incorporated as part of St. Catharines in 1961. In 1970 the Province of Ontario implemented a regional approach to deal with such issues as planning, pollution, transportation and services. As a result, Louth Township on the west side of the city was amalgamated, extending the city's boundary to Fifteen Mile Creek. With its current population of 131,989, St. Catharines has become the dominant centre of the Niagara region. Source: City of St. Catharines website http://www.stcatharines.ca/en/governin/HistoryOfTheCity.asp (January 27, 2011)

Barnes Wines: Canada’s Oldest Winery flyer. n.d.

In 1873 George Barnes, Andrew Skinner, James Skinner, John Young Reid, Charles Robert Murray, George Magan, Thomas Barnes and Robert Duncan applied for, and received a charter for a commercial winery which would be called The Ontario Grape Growing and Wine Manufacturing Company Limited. It opened in 1894 and became known as Barnes Wines Limited. In 1973 the company completed a merger with Reckitt and Coleman (Canada) Limited. The winery operated until 1988 and was located on the banks of the old Welland Canal in St. Catharines, Ontario. The company produced a complete line of table wines, dessert wines, sherries, ports, and both crackling and sparkling wines. Barnes Wines called itself “Canada’s oldest winery” at the time of the printing of this flyer.

Barnes Wines Fonds

4 Minute Books dated: 1880, 1892, 1901, 1934, 1948-1950, 1952-1953, 1955, 1958, 1962 – 1975, 1981, 1984, 1986; 3 Common stock books dated: 1934-1935, 1937-1941, 1946, 1948-1950, 1955-1956, 1958, 1961-1974, 1981 and 2 Class A stock books dated:1948 - 1951

St. Catharines documents including mortgages, wills and declarations, 1871-1914 (not inclusive)

Most of these documents refer to a tract of land located on the intersection of King and Court Streets (part of the Lawrie plan) and Carter properties in St. Catharines Ontario. The Security Loan and Savings Company of St. Catharines existed between 1870 and 1906. Thomas Rodman Merritt was the president.

Letter - Frederic Nicholls (Canadian General Electric) to W.B. Rankine, 17 December 1897

A letter from 2nd Vice President and General Manager of Canadian General Electric Company, Frederic Nicholls to W. B. Rankine regarding a bid for contract. The letter mentions that the bid for two alternating generators for the Canadian side of Niagara Falls was won by Westinghouse Eletric and Manufacturing Co. Nicholls also mentions that there will be other opportunites to win contracts as more machines are required. Nicholls also implies that Westinghouse may have bid under cost in an effort to secure the first of many contracts with the Canadian Niagara Power Company.

Towards Evaluating and Modelling the Impacts of Mobile-Based Augmented Reality Applications on Learning and Engagement

Mobile augmented reality applications are increasingly utilized as a medium for enhancing learning and engagement in history education. Although these digital devices facilitate learning through immersive and appealing experiences, their design should be driven by theories of learning and instruction. We provide an overview of an evidence-based approach to optimize the development of mobile augmented reality applications that teaches students about history. Our research aims to evaluate and model the impacts of design parameters towards learning and engagement. The research program is interdisciplinary in that we apply techniques derived from design-based experiments and educational data mining. We outline the methodological and analytical techniques as well as discuss the implications of the anticipated findings.

Johns-Manville (Canada) records, 1949-1977 (non-inclusive).

The Johns-Manville Company was founded in 1901with the merging of the H.W. Johns Manufacturing Company and the Manville Covering Company. Both companies made building materials using asbestos. The new company was based in New York, New York, and made products such as insulation and roofing materials, automotive sheet packing for cylinders, asbestos/cement, acoustical and magnesia products. Significant restructuring has occurred over the years as the company shifted from production of asbestos products to other types of building materials, such as fibre glass and forest products. Since 2001, the Johns-Manville Company has been owned by Berkshire Hathaway. The company began operations in Canada in 1918 in Asbestos, Quebec, where the Jeffrey Asbestos Mine was located. A Canadian plant opened in Port Union, Scarborough Township, in 1956, and another in North Bay, Ontario, in 1957. Both of these plants have since closed. The company currently has two plants in Canada, in Innisfail, Alberta, and Cornwall, Ontario.

By-Laws No. 1 through 11

The by-laws are signed by George Barnes and include the first two which state the name of the company is the Ontario Grape Growing and Wine Manufacturing Company and the second by-law states that the place of business is at Barnesdale, St. Catharines, Ontario.

Meeting 1 July 1881

The meeting notes include an audit for "year ending June 30th, 1880, thence to May, 25th, 1881". There is also an "auditor's report" by Richard Tew and P. Corridi which states: "To the President and shareholders of the Ontario Grape Growing and Wine Manufacturing Company, Barnsdale, Ont. Gentlemen, We the undersigned have much pleasure in informing you that we have completed our audit of the Company's Books for the year ending June 30th, 1880, thence to May 24th, 1881, and can testify to their correctness. In future we would recommend that the Books be made up to May 24th in each year, five weeks previous to the Annual meeting being held, and that the Day Book kept by the manager be submitted to the Secretary monthly, together with all vouchers, so that the transactions can be duly recorded in the Company's Books. We beg to congratulate the shareholders on the satisfactory exhibit of the Company's affairs, as shown by the annexed Balance Sheet. We are Gentlemen, yours respectfully." This is the first audit included in the book.

By-Law No. 21

A by-law that reads in part, "Be it therefore enacted by the Ontario Grape Growing & Wines Manufacturing Company Limited, that the said George Plunkett Magann is hereby directed and required to convey premises, namely all and singular that certain parcel or track of land situate lying and being in the Township of Grantham and Louth in the County of Lincoln, containing by the same more or less being composed of parts of lots numbered twenty-one and twenty-three in the third and fourth follows, that is to say etc. etc. Adopted and passed this second day of September A.D. 1901."

By-Law No. 56

The by-law reads: "Be it enacted as a By-Law of the Ontario Grape Growing & Wine Manufacturing Company Limited that the Directors be and they are hereby authorized to make application to the lieutenant-Governor of the Province of Ontario, for issuance of Supplementary letters Patent providing for, 1) Changing the name of the said Company to Barnes Wines, Limited. 2) The Management of the affairs of the Company by a Board of 7 Directors. 3) Re-dividing the Capitol Stock of the Company from 60 shares of par value of $500.00 each, to 6000 shares of par value of $5.00 each. Passed this 5th day of February A.D. 1934."

Feature Selection and Classification Using Age Layered Population Structure Genetic Programming

The curse of dimensionality is a major problem in the fields of machine learning, data mining and knowledge discovery. Exhaustive search for the most optimal subset of relevant features from a high dimensional dataset is NP hard. Sub–optimal population based stochastic algorithms such as GP and GA are good choices for searching through large search spaces, and are usually more feasible than exhaustive and deterministic search algorithms. On the other hand, population based stochastic algorithms often suffer from premature convergence on mediocre sub–optimal solutions. The Age Layered Population Structure (ALPS) is a novel metaheuristic for overcoming the problem of premature convergence in evolutionary algorithms, and for improving search in the fitness landscape. The ALPS paradigm uses an age–measure to control breeding and competition between individuals in the population. This thesis uses a modification of the ALPS GP strategy called Feature Selection ALPS (FSALPS) for feature subset selection and classification of varied supervised learning tasks. FSALPS uses a novel frequency count system to rank features in the GP population based on evolved feature frequencies. The ranked features are translated into probabilities, which are used to control evolutionary processes such as terminal–symbol selection for the construction of GP trees/sub-trees. The FSALPS metaheuristic continuously refines the feature subset selection process whiles simultaneously evolving efficient classifiers through a non–converging evolutionary process that favors selection of features with high discrimination of class labels. We investigated and compared the performance of canonical GP, ALPS and FSALPS on high–dimensional benchmark classification datasets, including a hyperspectral image. Using Tukey’s HSD ANOVA test at a 95% confidence interval, ALPS and FSALPS dominated canonical GP in evolving smaller but efficient trees with less bloat expressions. FSALPS significantly outperformed canonical GP and ALPS and some reported feature selection strategies in related literature on dimensionality reduction.

Feature Selection and Classification Using Age Layered Population Structure Genetic Programming

The curse of dimensionality is a major problem in the fields of machine learning, data mining and knowledge discovery. Exhaustive search for the most optimal subset of relevant features from a high dimensional dataset is NP hard. Sub–optimal population based stochastic algorithms such as GP and GA are good choices for searching through large search spaces, and are usually more feasible than exhaustive and determinis- tic search algorithms. On the other hand, population based stochastic algorithms often suffer from premature convergence on mediocre sub–optimal solutions. The Age Layered Population Structure (ALPS) is a novel meta–heuristic for overcoming the problem of premature convergence in evolutionary algorithms, and for improving search in the fitness landscape. The ALPS paradigm uses an age–measure to control breeding and competition between individuals in the population. This thesis uses a modification of the ALPS GP strategy called Feature Selection ALPS (FSALPS) for feature subset selection and classification of varied supervised learning tasks. FSALPS uses a novel frequency count system to rank features in the GP population based on evolved feature frequencies. The ranked features are translated into probabilities, which are used to control evolutionary processes such as terminal–symbol selection for the construction of GP trees/sub-trees. The FSALPS meta–heuristic continuously refines the feature subset selection process whiles simultaneously evolving efficient classifiers through a non–converging evolutionary process that favors selection of features with high discrimination of class labels. We investigated and compared the performance of canonical GP, ALPS and FSALPS on high–dimensional benchmark classification datasets, including a hyperspectral image. Using Tukey’s HSD ANOVA test at a 95% confidence interval, ALPS and FSALPS dominated canonical GP in evolving smaller but efficient trees with less bloat expressions. FSALPS significantly outperformed canonical GP and ALPS and some reported feature selection strategies in related literature on dimensionality reduction.

Indenture of Release to Woodstock and Lake Erie Railway from Executors of Samuel Zimmerman

Indenture of release regarding a loan of 12, 500 pounds which Samuel Zimmerman (deceased) is said to have lent and advanced to the Woodstock and Lake Erie Railway and Harbour Company. This is put forward by the executors who include: Joseph A. Woodruff, Richard Woodruff, John L. Ranney and Richard Miller. This document releases and exonerates the Railway Company from any debts to the executors. [The outside of the document says 1857, but the actual date is Feb. 10, 1858].