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:
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.Burke's Peerage, Burke's Peerage & Baronetage, qv. BOOTH, Bt He was related to the Booth Baronets.Arnold McNaughton, The Book of Kings: A Royal Genealogy, in 3 volumes (London, U.K.: Garnstone Press, 1973), volume 1, page 186.
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 ) 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 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 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 ) 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.
The mills' output was so large that its Fraserfield lumber yard and railyard, acquired in 1870, extended along Bronson Avenue as far south as Carling Avenue, backing onto The Glebe.
The Chaudière Island mills were so extensive that Booth issued tokens for use there, which were in circulation from 1893 until the 1940s.
Fire was a constant threat to his mills, and they burnt down in 1893, 1886, 1900 and 1903. In 1900 alone, 100 million feet of lumber was lost to fire, and Booth also lost his home located at Wellington and Preston Street., at pp. 41-43 The extent of the fire led to a controversial proposal to restrict the amount of lumber being held in the yards, but intensive lobbying by Booth and other lumbermen effectively killed that measure as well as a later one in 1903. Much of Booth's personal and business records were lost in these fires. It was also of concern within the timber limits as well, and Booth once said, "If fires are kept out of the forests, there will be more pine in this country 100 years from now than there was fifty years ago, and we shall have lots of timber for the generation to come."
Booth established a hydroelectric generating station at Chaudière Falls in 1909 in order to power his sawmill and planing mill, after fifty years of using penstocks distributed around his property to directly feed the water turbines that powered his machinery. The construction of the station resulted in the water level of the Ottawa River being raised by , which meant the end of log rafting there.
Railways
Formation of Canada Atlantic 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.
Expansion to Georgian Bay
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., and
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.
It was said that the first phase of the CAR's construction was undertaken without any government assistance, which was unusual at the time. Booth himself was concerned with building the railways as well as marketing the service to build and maintain tonnage on the new lines. He was open to cooperation with other railways in eastern and western Canada, as well as to sale or amalgamation with a larger railway system, and was contemplating such a sale by 1901. Whether it was because Booth at age 74 was tired, or because he realized that competition from other transcontinental lines would soon cause serious problems for the CAR, he did everything possible in the early years of the 20th century to make every aspect of the railway profitable, and therefore attractive to potential buyers.
Booth also operated grain elevators at Depot Harbour, Coteau, Duluth and Milwaukee, and steamships on the Great Lakes, and formed the Canada Atlantic Transit Company, which operated five large lake freighters on the Upper Great Lakes.
Sale to Grand Trunk