Redpath Sugar, A Sweet Story
Products and places carry names that have their own stories. Once we scratch the surface, wanting to know more, these names forever lose their anonymity. One of these began as the story of a young Scottish orphan named John Redpath.
John Redpath started with nothing to lose. Well recounted in Richard Feltoe's 2004 book A Gentleman of Substance, he shows that there was no parish record of John’s birth. Born to Peter Redpath and Elisabeth Pringle in a village south of Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1796, his father Peter was a farm worker who had lost a wife prior to marrying Elisabeth, but they both died, leaving John orphaned at a young age.
His elder half-sister Elspeth cared for the young John, and she must have been a remarkable woman, eventually finding him an apprenticeship in stonemasonry with George Drummond in Edinburgh. By his late teens his prospects were better, but then his world became overwhelmed by the crushing depression that followed the defeat of Napoleon in1815. Rivalry with France had been good for the economy, but victory led to swarms of returning soldiers, economic collapse, accelerating industrialization, the Scottish and Irish land clearances and ultimately to disastrous events such as the Irish potato famine. Victory was good for only the very wealthy. Feltoe describes the hardship and shows how the newspapers counterbalanced them with glowing reports of the 'promised land' in Britain's North American colonies. In 1816, John, his brother and two nephews put together just enough money, food, water and bedding to allow them to risk a trip in the hold of a ship bound for the New World, for Quebec City.
Something else chose that year to travel, too. The noise from the eruption of Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa on April 5, 1815, was heard 1400 kilometres away and the volcano killed 72,000 people, destroying the Tamboran Kingdom. Four times as large as the famous Krakatoa, it spewed dust and debris into the atmosphere, forming dust clouds that travelled around the world, cooling the planet. Its effects were concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere in 1816.
John arrived in Quebec City during that ‘Summer that Never Was.’ Snowfalls in June as well as frost in July and early September all contributed to crop failures and very hard times. There is no record of his impressions, but it soon became clear that prospects in Quebec City were no better than they had been back home. The recent arrivals’ attempts to find any opportunity proved fruitless but they heard that Montreal might be different. Lacking any funds to get to Montreal, they determined to walk, carrying their meagre possessions on their backs and no doubt sleeping and eating where they could find shelter and food during that harsh summer. John carefully packed his only pair of boots into his bag and set off barefoot. He knew that his boots would wear out during the long walk. Who would employ a barefoot twenty-year-old who claimed to be a stonemason? Better to keep the boots for work.
By the end of 1816, the four Scots found employment as stonemasons in Montreal.
With his limited resources, Redpath joined St. Gabriel's Presbyterian Church, paying the cost of a first-class pew. As Feltoe observes, even though he was barely 21 years old, in this manner he declared his ambition. A year later, he married Jane McVie, or Janet McPhee, both names appearing in different records. She was the daughter of a stonemason. Within two years, John was a self-employed contractor and his work came to the attention of the government. By the time he was 24 he had created a partnership with Thomas McKay, another Scot and stonemason just four years Redpath’s senior, and they landed a contract to build parts of the Lachine Canal.
A canal through the Lachine Rapids had first been attempted under French rule when Sulpician Father Superior François Dollier de Casson conceived of the idea in the 1680s. From the time of Jacques Cartier, it was clear that the river was simply not deep enough for classical European navigation. Champlain solved the problem by depending upon the Algonquin methods, using canoes, but European boats could not effectively penetrate to the Iroquoian heartland and navigate the major rivers without first increasing the river's depth. Dollier de Casson also hoped to create an easier route for the fur trade and to build a flour mill to defray some of the costs.
The Seneca did not let Dollier de Casson finish his canal project. Unknown to him, the French governor Marquis de Denonville had seriously mistreated them. When England and France went to war, the English informed the Seneca long before the French crown informed Denonville. The Seneca raised 1500 Five Nations warriors, launching a surprise attack and killing or capturing 250 of the 375 residents of Lachine, inflicting heavy damage on the buildings and scrapping the canal project. When a consortium of largely Scottish-Canadian businessmen undertook the challenge of building the canal a century and a half later, they were not faced with the same constraints.
John Redpath worked on many of the important sites in Montreal including renovation work on Dollier de Casson’s Notre Dame Basilica, the fortifications on St. Helen's Island, Molson's Brewery and the Bank of Montreal. He also partnered again with McKay building the locks at Jones Falls, the most challenging engineering project on the Rideau Canal.
A shrewd manager, Redpath acquired land along the Lachine Canal from the Sulpicians and invested in shipping, banking, insurance, supporting institutions like the Montreal General Hospital and the Mechanics’ Institute, but perhaps the most intriguing was his support of a group solicitating government help to confront trafficking in white slavery. Headed by Agatha Henrietta Huguet-Latour-McDonnell, founder of the Montreal Magdalen Asylum, among their objectives was to help ‘fallen’ women get a new start.
In 1854, then 58 years old, he built Canada’s first sugar refinery, initially from cane sugar, and his seven-storey plant became a landmark in Montreal. Not forgetting his difficult beginnings, he called back to his mentor's family in Scotland and invited young George Alexander Drummond, recently graduated as a chemist, to come work for him. George, together with John’s own son Peter, named for a father John never knew, grew into the role, and Redpath Sugar grew with them becoming Canada’s major source of refined sugar.
Canada Sugar Refining Co. - Barrie Examiner, 28 Dec 1916, p. 11 from Wikipedia
Today, Redpath Sugar is one of those names that we see in the grocery store alongside many other brands, each with its own story, and John Redpath’s remarkable life is commemorated in the naming of half a dozen places including the Redpath Museum of Natural History, built by his son Peter and donated to McGill University in 1882, Rue and Place Redpath, Redpath Hall, and the Redpath Sugar Museum in Toronto.