John Rudolphus Booth (April 5, 1827 - December 8, 1925) was a Canadian lumber tycoon and railroad baron. He controlled logging rights for large tracts of forest land in central Ontario, and built the Canada Atlantic Railway (from Georgian Bay via Ottawa to Vermont) to extract his logs and to export lumber and grain to the United States and Europe. In 1892, his lumber complex was the largest operation of its kind in the world.
He arrived in Bytown (later renamed Ottawa) at the same time as many other future lumber entrepreneurs such as Henry Bronson, W.G. Perley, John Harris and E.B. Eddy. Even so, by 1890 Booth had overtaken them all to become the largest lumber producer in the world. It was said that at one point the timberlands under his control occupied an area larger than France.
He was familiar with all aspects of his industry, and one observer noted:
[He] knew the forest as a sailor knows the sea, and his success was largely due to the fact that he never overestimated its potentialities.
Contents
Early life
J. R. Booth was born on a farm at Lowes near Waterloo (Shefford County) in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Lower Canada. His parents, John Booth (Ireland, 1802 - Quebec, 1877) and Eleanor Helen Booth (née Rowley) (Ireland, 1804 - Quebec, 1834) were Irish immigrants, had a number of children (variously reported as 5, 6 and 8); his paternal grandparents were John Booth and Elizabeth Hill; his patrilineal great-grandfather, Robert Booth who married Eleanor Taylor, was the son of Peter Booth, whose father, James Booth, a Freeman of Dublin, was fourth son of the Rev. Humphrey Booth and wife Letitia Jones. He was related to the Booth Baronets.
John Booth left the family farm at the age of 21 and got a job as a carpenter with the Central Vermont Railroad.
In Kingsey Township, Lower Canada, on January 7, 1853, he married Rosalinda Cooke (Philipsburg, Monteregie Region, Quebec, March 12, 1829 - Ottawa, Ontario, March 24, 1886, buried in Beechwood Cemetery, Ottawa, Ottawa Municipality, Ontario), daughter of Thomas Cooke (1790 - Abbott's Corner, Monteregie Region, Quebec, July 15, 1873) and wife Eliza Armstrong (Ireland, July 1808 - Saint-Armand, Monteregie Region, Quebec, March 29, 1871, buried in Abbott's Corner Cemetery, Monteregie Region, Quebec), and maternal granddaughter of Robert Armstrong Sr. (Whalton, Northumberland, August 30, 1777 - Franklin, Franklin County, Vermont, January 30, 1850, buried in Abbott's Corner Cemetery, Monteregie Region, Quebec) and wife Ann Lattimore Booth (Rennington, Northumberland, April 8, 1786 - Franklin, Franklin County, Vermont, October 21, 1849, buried in Abbott's Corner Cemetery, Monteregie Region, Quebec), and moved to the Ottawa River valley. He was involved in the construction of a paper mill in Sherbrooke, and a sawmill in Hull. Upon completion of the latter, its owner, Andrew Leamy hired him to manage the mill for a year. He then ventured out on his own, opening a shingle mill in Hull in a mill that he rented from Alonzo Wright, but within months it was destroyed by fire. He established his own lumber company and won the contract to supply wood for the Parliament buildings at the new Canadian capital of Ottawa, selected by Queen Victoria in 1858. In winning the contract, he underbid more established firms by hiring unemployed longshoremen from Montreal.
Building a lumber and railway empire
Lumber
Booth harvested timber from the upper Ottawa River and its tributaries, driving them down the river to his mills, and is known to have started logging in the Amable du Fond River and Lake Nosbonsing area in the late 1860s, arriving at Depot Creek in 1870. Booth expanded his timber limits into the Lake Nipissing watershed in 1881. In order to reach his Ottawa mills, Booth constructed the Nosbonsing & Nipissing Railway (length 5.5 miles (8.9 km)) in 1884 to carry sawlogs over the portage from Lake Nipissing to the headwaters of the Mattawa. It was subsequently incorporated as a separate company by Act of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario in 1886.
Booth's vision and boldness were qualities that made him a success. In 1867, he purchased, for $40,000, the timber rights of John Egan's 250 square miles (650 km2) of pine on the Madawaska River in what is now Algonquin Park. Five years later, he refused an offer of more than $1 million to sell those rights.
During the latter half of the 19th Century, he amassed timber rights approaching 7,000 square miles (18,000 km2) in Central and Northern Ontario which he would harvest for his mills. He often went to his Algonquin timber limits in his own private railway car, working beside his men during the day and on business affairs most of the night, seldom sleeping for more than a few hours. He was always on the lookout for opportunities to reduce costs, and in 1894 he began investing in tugboats in order to accelerate the delivery of log booms to the Chaudière mill.
In 1891, Booth installed 13 band saws at his Ottawa mill, which was said to be more than anywhere else in the world. The next year, that mill produced 140 million board feet (about 25,000 cubic feet (710 m3)) of lumber. It required the supply of 2 million logs annually in order to run at capacity, and some of his timber limits were so remote that it took up to two years for logs to reach the mill. Booth was so dominant in the industry that he assumed the role of price leader, where all competitors met the prices he set for his product. His leading status would continue until 1919, when William Cameron Edwards and others would achieve greater outputs.
Half of the mills' output was shipped to England; the rest to the United States and throughout Canada. White pine from Booth's lumber yards was used to build the decks on the ocean liners of the Cunard Line, including the Lusitania and Mauretania. In 1905, he constructed a new plant and entered the pulp and paper business, thus being able to use softwood that he had been previously forced to sell. He expanded into the United States through the establishment of docks and a distribution centre at Rouses Point, New York, a planing mill and box factory at Burlington, Vermont, and a sales office in Boston.
Railways
Booth's sawmill operations could never run at full capacity because the output could not be carried out of the lumber yards fast enough. Because of these transportation problems in the Ottawa area, Booth became an important participant in the development of Canada's railway system when he purchased the Montreal and City of Ottawa Junction Railway (M&OJ) and the Coteau and Province Line Railway and Bridge Company (C&PL) in 1879, amalgamating them to form the Canada Atlantic Railway. The M&OJ had received a charter to build southeast from Ottawa to Coteau Landing on the north bank of the St. Lawrence River. The C&PL had received a charter to build a bridge across the St. Lawrence River to Valleyfield, Quebec and then operate a railway across southwestern Quebec to the United States border. Due to financial difficulties, neither line had been completed, and Booth worked to complete the entire route by 1882. The Coteau bridge was completed in 1890, thus eliminating the necessity of transshipping cargo by barge. The CAR formed a subsidiary, the Vermont and Province Line Railroad, which would build a line to Swanton, Vermont on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain in 1897, thus connecting Ottawa to the United States via the Delaware and Hudson Railway, the Rutland Railroad, and the Central Vermont Railway.
In 1888, Booth chartered the Ottawa, Arnprior and Renfrew Railway to build a line from Ottawa to Renfrew, as well as the Ottawa and Parry Sound Railway to do the same from Parry Sound to Renfrew. In 1891, the two lines (together with the Parry Sound Colonization Railway in 1893) were amalgamated into the Ottawa, Arnprior and Parry Sound Railway (OA&PS), which ran from Georgian Bay through southern Algonquin Park to Ottawa.
When the PSCR was taken over by Booth, the original intention was to have its terminus at Parry Sound. However, the high prices demanded by local landowners prompted him to choose a location on nearby Parry Island, which would become Depot Harbour. When completed, Depot Harbour became one of the most prominent ports on the Great Lakes, rivalling Collingwood, Midland and Owen Sound. It was the shortest route for shipping grain to the Atlantic, with trains arriving and departing every twenty minutes.
All three lines met "end to end". The M&OJ met the OA&PS on Booth's sawmill property in Ottawa while the C&PL met the M&OJ in Coteau, using several hundred feet of trackage rights of the Grand Trunk Railway (GTR). In 1899, the OA&PS amalgamated with the CAR. As a result, Booth ruled the largest railway empire built in North America by any one man.
Other interests
At the creation of the Lady Stanley Institute for Trained Nurses in 1890 in Ottawa, he was a member of the Provisional Committee. Later in 1892, he became Life Governor of that same Institute by paying at least the amount of $500.
Booth was a significant investor in the Canada Cement Company formed by Max Aitken, which is now part of Lafarge. He was also a director of Foster-Cobalt Mining which took part in the Cobalt silver rush, whose origin took place on one of Booth's timber limits.
Together with M.J. O'Brien, he also invested in The Dominion Nickel-Copper Company (owner of the Murray Mine) in order to create a potential competitor to International Nickel. It was subsequently sold to Frederick Stark Pearson, William Mackenzie and Donald Mann and became the British America Nickel Corporation, in which Booth was a director. In 1921, Booth was induced to vote in favour of a bondholders' reorganization scheme through the promised issue of $2,000,000 of British American stock. The reorganization was later held by the Ontario courts as not binding on the minority bondholders, and the ruling was upheld by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in a decision that has influenced corporate jurisprudence throughout the British Commonwealth. After Inco drove British American into bankruptcy in 1924 by aggressively cutting the price of nickel, it later acquired British American's assets.
Later years
J. R. Booth continued to run his business empire well into his nineties. Only in 1921 did he convert it from a sole proprietorship into a corporation (known as J.R. Booth Limited). He died in 1925 at the age of 98 after being ill for several months and was survived by his sons Jackson, John Frederick, daughter Helen Gertrude Fleck and several grandchildren and great grandchildren.
In 1943, J.R. Booth Limited, with the exception of its lumber division, was sold to George Weston Limited to become part of the E. B. Eddy Company. The lumber mill was later sold to E. B. Eddy in 1946.
Other influences
Booth's impact was significant on Ottawa:
The right of way used by the Ottawa, Arnprior and Parry Sound Railway within Ottawa is now used as the Queensway.
Booth Street in Ottawa (which connects to Hull, Quebec via the Chaudière Bridge), together with rue Booth in Gatineau, Quebec and chemin Booth in Kingsmere, Quebec, were named in his honour.
J.R. Booth leased a property on Lac Deschênes to the Britannia Bay Boating Club. Designed by Edgar Lewis Horwood, the clubhouse was opened in 1896.
J.R. Booth donated the land on the southwest corner of Richmond Road and Britannia Road for the Britannia Heights Methodist Church, which had been meeting in homes since 1869. The Britannia Heights Methodist Church formed in 1873.
The acreage he acquired for pasturing the horses for his mills would later become the Dominion Experimental Farm.
Booth also had a summer home in Kingsmere, Quebec, on the north shore of Kingsmere Lake.
In Algonquin Provincial Park, Booth Lake is named after him. However, most other traces of Booth's interests in the Park (including a summer retreat at the Barclay Estate on Rock Lake) were razed by the Province of Ontario as their leases on crown land ran out.
Two geographic townships have been named after him. In Quebec, Booth Township was surveyed and established in 1908. It is located east of Kipawa, and is part of the unorganized territory of Les Lacs-du-Témiscamingue in the Témiscamingue Regional County Municipality. In Ontario, Booth Township was surveyed and established in 1962. It is located immediately north of Nipigon in Thunder Bay District.
In 1892, Booth rented a cottage at Saranac Lake, New York, where his daughter would cure for several years. Booth brought a pair of skis with him, thus introducing the sport of skiing to the area.
Death, descendants and legacy
Booth died in Ottawa on December 8, 1925. On his passing, Michael Grattan O'Leary of the Ottawa Journal noted that what people should remember about him was that he was:
not the great magnate whose wealth is the envy of many and the wonder of more; but the great pioneer, the man whose genius and imagination tamed the wilderness . . . and, above all, did more than any man of his time to build up this Ottawa Valley.
Also at that time, William Lyon Mackenzie King observed:
Mr. Booth was indeed one of the Fathers of Canada; it is not too much to say that it is to men of such sterling worth and indomitable will as he possessed, more than aught else, that we owe the development of our Dominion.
Booth's fortune was a subject of much speculative commentary during the latter years of his life, with estimates ranging up to $100 million. At his death his estate was officially valued at almost $7.7 million; the property was later re-evaluated upwards to $23 million. Although succession duties of $4.28 million were paid in 1927, in 1937 Ontario Premier Mitchell Hepburn subsequently claimed more and had the Legislative Assembly of Ontario pass the necessary legislation to overcome the legal obstacles. J.R's heirs eventually paid another $3 million in 1939.
His son John Frederick Booth, who lived in Canada, married and had a daughter Lois Frances Booth (born Ottawa, Ontario, 2 August 1897; died Copenhagen, 26 February 1941), who was married in Ottawa, Ontario, on 11 February 1924 to Count Erik of Rosenborg, whom she divorced in 1937; they had two children. At the time of the marriage, it was rumoured that Booth contributed half of her $4-million dowry. J.R. issued a formal denial. She later remarried Thorkild Juelsberg, without issue.