In 2025, the Bomb Girls Legacy Foundation worked with the Town of Brownsburg, Quebec and the City of Toronto to unveil two memorial plaques celebrating Bomb Girls. Brownsburg boasts a storied past of munitions work in Canada, dating back to 1875. Lorraine Dixon, a native of Brownsburg, worked with local government, the Bomb Girls Legacy Foundation, and Orica – the munitions company that operates in town today – to bring this initiative to life. For the town’s 150th anniversary, on September 13, 2025, the Town of Brownsburg and Orica unveiled a phenomenal monument dedicated to the legacy of Canada’s Bomb Girls.
In Scarborough, Ontario, on November 10, 2025, local Toronto City Councillor for Scarborough Southwest, Parthi Kandavel, along with Heritage Toronto and the Bomb Girls Legacy Foundation, unveiled an historic plaque where the original GECO factory operated during the Second World War. The plaque sits near the corner of Warden Avenue and Civic Road by the city water tower.
The General Engineering Company (GECO) operated a top-secret munitions factory here during the Second World War. The giant manufacturing facility employed 21,000 people throughout the war, most of them women, nicknamed the Bomb Girls.
In the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of women joined the workforce in place of men serving in the military, often in industries that once excluded them. GECO covered 346 acres between Eglinton Avenue, Warden Avenue, Sinnott Road, and Hymus Road. It consisted of 172 buildings linked by more than four kilometres of tunnels. Workers here risked their lives filling bomb fuses and bullets with gunpowder and other high explosives.
The site was split into a dirty side, where work unrelated to explosives was situated, and a clean side that made munitions. The clean side that made up most of the plant was divided into the “GP,” or gunpowder, group and the “HE” group, where workers handled high explosives such as tetryl, TNT, cordite, and magnesium oxide.
GECO filled over 256 million fuses from 1941 to 1945. The Bomb Girls’ work was vital to the Allied victory in the Second World War. Scarborough’s emblem — Sc/C, etched on every fuse — was a sign of quality on the battlefield.
After the war, several GECO buildings became emergency housing for about 2,000 veterans and their families. New factories opened on Eglinton from Birchmount Road to Victoria Park Avenue, becoming Scarborough’s “Golden Mile of Industry.
French: Des femmes d’Argenteuil et de partout au pays ont contribute a l’effort de guerre en travaillant dans les usines de munitions pendant les deux guerres mondiales. A Brownsburg-Chatham, elles ont oeuvre avec courage a la Dominion Cartridge de 1914 a 1918 et a la Defence Industries Limited, une filiale de Canadian Industries Limited de 1939 a 1945. Elles sont connues mondialement sus le nom de Munitionnetteso ou Bomb Girls. Ces femmes ont risque leur vie pour render le monde Meilleur.
English: Women from Argenteuil and across the country contributed to the war effort by working in munitions factories during both World Wars. In Brownsburg-Chatham, they worked bravely at Dominion Cartridge from 1914 to 1918 and at Defence Industries Limited, a subsidiary of Canadian Industries Limited, from 1939 to 1945. They are known worldwide as Munitionnettes or Bomb Girls. These women risked their lives to make the world a better place.
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