Robert Reford was born at Moylena, which for generations had been the family seat near Antrim, Ireland, in 1831 and was a lad of fourteen when in 1845 he came with his mother, three brothers and one sister to make his home in Canada. The family arrived at Quebec the night of the great fire when the lower town was almost completely destroyed. After a very brief stay in Montreal they settled in Toronto, where Mr. Reford completed his education. He was, however, still but a boy when he became engaged in business and, though he was indentured to work for his first employer for two years at a fixed salary, it is indicative of the great natural capacity which he possessed and of his steadiness and alertness in business, that at the end of the first year his salary was increased fivefold and again at the end of the second year that amount was doubled. In three years time, still barely on the threshold of manhood, Robert Reford had proved his ability to such an extent as to be offered a partnership with William Strachan in a wholesale and retail grocery business which the latter was about to open. This offer was accepted but the firm dissolved after a few years duration and Mr. Reford started a business on his own account, which he continued to conduct alone for several years, only taking Richard Dunbar as a partner when he acquired, by purchase, from William Ross, another large wholesale business of the same nature. The two businesses were run separately, one as Reford & Dunbar, the other in partnership with the late John Dillon, as Reford & Dillon, wholesale grocers and merchants. It would indeed have been strange if a man, imbued with the spirit of enterprise and courage, as was Mr. Reford to a very remarkable degree, had been content to remain without some wider scope for his abilities than that offered, even by a successful wholesale business. It was not long before he took the initial step which was to lead him so far along the path of that vast question of transportation. [Illustration: ROBERT REFORD] Mr. Reford was one of the pioneer workers in this direction, entering the carrying trade, in the early ’60s. He amassed a considerable fortune during the forty odd years he was engaged in shipping pursuits but never did he lose sight of the fact that Canada’s interests as a whole are intimately and indivisibly bound up in every phase of the shipping industry, nor did he ever fail to consider and work towards the benefit of those wider interests of his adopted country. The operation of vessels on the Great Lakes was the beginning of Mr. Reford’s shipping enterprises. In 1860 he equipped the schooner “Seagull” and sent her with a general cargo of Canadian produce to Port Natal, South Africa, thus being the first man to undertake direct shipping connection between Canada and that part of the world.