A Cyclopædia of Canadian Biography: Brief biographies of persons distinguished in the professional, military and political life, and the commerce and industry of Canada, in the twentieth century
History
A Cyclopædia of Canadian Biography: Brief biographies of persons distinguished in the professional, military and political life, and the commerce and industry of Canada, in the twentieth century
Canada -- Biography
statistical information, he laid the whole matter before his father, who
had it brought before the leading men of the County of Leeds, and the
proposition made that if the municipalities would bear the expense of
preliminary survey and obtain the charter, and grant aid by way of bonus
to the extent of $125,000, Eugene M. Cole would work up the scheme and
obtain the capital and contractors to build at least the first section
of the road to Westport. This was agreed to, the last bonus by-law being
passed on July 15, 1885, and work on the construction of the railway
commenced on January 13, 1886. Although ably assisted by many persons in
the County of Leeds in connection with the enterprise, the credit of the
inception of the scheme, and the labor in working it up materially and
financially, belong to Eugene M. Cole. Colonel Cole died December 13,
1915, in his eighty-second year, being pre-deceased by his wife by about
two months.
* * * * *
=Scott, James Guthrie=, the prominent railway manager of Quebec City,
was born in that city on February 13, 1847, the son of Hugh Erskine
Scott. His mother’s maiden name was Margaret Chillas. The family of the
Scotts has filled an important place in the community since the days of
Mr. Scott’s grandfather, who came from Scotland. Mr. Henry S. Scott,
hardware merchant, was his uncle, and Mr. William C. Scott and Mr.
Charles Scott, his brothers, all of whom took an active interest in the
progress of the city, as has their distinguished relative. The latter
received his early education at the Quebec High School. In his
seventeenth year he had his first start in business in the offices of
the Montmorency Lumber Mills, where he eventually became head of one of
the departments. In 1879, he entered the service of the Quebec and Lake
St. John Railway, becoming, in time, its general manager and assuming
the onerous task of having that line completed as far as Chicoutimi and
extended, under the name of the Great Northern, to Hawkesbury, Ont.,
across the Ottawa, a distance in all of five hundred miles. But for Mr.
Scott’s supervisory tact and engineering skill, Quebec would hardly have
become the important railway terminal that it now is, not only of the
Canadian Northern System, but of the National Transcontinental. During
the earlier operations of the Quebec and Lake St. John Railway, Mr.
Scott and his Board of Directors organized a system of assisted
colonization that peopled the parishes all along their line, as many as
from ten to twelve thousand families being induced to take up homesteads
in the districts opened up for settlement. For twenty-five years Mr.
Scott was _facile princeps_ in these beneficent operations; and it was
only when the Canadian Northern Railway Company took over the properties
supervised by him in 1908, that he decided to retire from office to take
up other work involving the commercial advancement of his native city.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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