Colin Campbell Ferrie

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• FindAGrave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8658426
• Eby ID Number: Waterloo-114263

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November 9,1856 Death of Colin C. Ferrie; Esq. We deeply regret to announce the sudden death of Mr. Colin Ferrie of Hamilton, which took place at his residence in Hamilton on Sunday.Few men in Upper Canada are better known and more highly respected than was Mr. Ferrie. As head of the firm of C. J. Ferrie & Co., and as President of the Gore Bank, he stood high among the business men, and in the political world he had been long known as a consistent Liberal. He was the first Mayor of Hamilton and he had a seat in the Upper Canada Parliament before the Union. Mr Ferrie's death will cause deep grief to a wide circle of friends. He was the eldest son of the Hon. Adam Ferrie, and brother of Mr. Robert Ferrie M.P.P.

Berlin Chronicle Newspaper 12 Nov 1856

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FERRIE, COLIN CAMPBELL, businessman, justice of the peace, politician, and office holder; baptized May 1808 in Glasgow, son of Adam Ferrie* and Rachel Campbell; m. 8 Dec. 1830 Catherine Priscilla Beasley, daughter of merchant Richard Beasley*, and they had two sons; d. 9 Nov. 1856 in Hamilton, Upper Canada.

The eldest son of a Glasgow textile merchant, Colin Campbell Ferrie arrived in Montreal in 1824 with William Cormack, a partner in the wholesale and forwarding firm of Ferrie, Cormack and Company, newly established there by Colin's father. As a result of Cormack's subsequent mishandling of the business, the partnership was dissolved in 1826 but under Colin's management the firm recovered. In 1829 he entered into partnership with his brother Adam* and his father. The latter settled in Montreal and agreed to supply the wholesale and retail store established by his sons in the boom town of Hamilton under the name of Colin Ferrie and Company. Between 1830 and 1833 branches of the Hamilton store were set up at Brantford, Preston (Cambridge), Nelson (Burlington), Dundas, and Waterloo, centres which figured prominently in the rapid expansion of Hamilton's commercial hinterland.

Colin Ferrie's firm supplied rural merchants who, lacking sufficient credit, were unable to buy directly from forwarding companies in Montreal. Credit was likewise extended to retail customers. Further risk was incurred when produce was accepted on account, for fluctuations in market prices and shipping problems often upset anticipated returns. The business had a seasonal rhythm which began after the opening of navigation in late spring with the arrival of customers as well as supplies from Adam Ferrie Sr in Montreal. During the following winter, when bulky country goods owed on account could be transported by sleigh and delinquent clients were less likely to flee, Colin tried to settle debts. Clerks, such as Jasper Tough Gilkison*, were frequently sent out to make collections and, if that failed, debtors were brought to court. In 1833, for example, more than 20 summonses were issued on Ferrie's behalf. Some clients fled, others paid, and a few were sent to the Gore District jail, which Ferrie supplied. Appointed a justice of the peace in 1833, he made use of his powers to arrest those who stole from his store.

Legal recourse helped to shore up Colin's mercantile affairs, but he also sought to stabilize Hamilton-based trade by promoting local transportation facilities and financial institutions. As secretary of a joint-stock company formed to operate a steamboat out of Hamilton, he helped raise the capital that led to the launching of the Constitution in the summer of 1833. That November Ferrie and other district businessmen, including Andrew Steven*, submitted a petition for a chartered bank at Hamilton which resulted in the incorporation of the Gore Bank two years later. Ferrie succeeded James Matthew Whyte* as its president in 1839 and held the position until his death.

Throughout the 1830s Ferrie's mercantile, legal, and civic interests pervaded Hamilton. Unlike the brash parvenu Allan Napier MacNab*, he appears to have taken up public office as a duty and not simply as an opportunity. He occupied many local positions, but in a quiet fashion that lacked partisan zeal. During the cholera epidemic of 1832 he chaired the board of health and a year later was a member of the town's first board of police. In 1839 he helped to organize the Hamilton and Gore Mechanics' Institute and the local St Andrew's Society. He had resigned his position as a returning officer three years earlier to run successfully in the provincial election for Hamilton, which he represented in the House of Assembly until 1841. A moderate tory, Ferrie, like his father, did not respond vindictively to the rebellion of 1837-38 and, in fact, appeared as a defence witness at the trial of Solomon Lossing, the London District magistrate who was charged with treason but found not guilty. In the assembly, Ferrie's most noteworthy position was as a member of the select committee which investigated the financial crisis of 1837 [see Sir Francis Bond Head*].

Despite Ferrie's many positions, his affluence, prestige, and confidence were drastically reduced by the collapse brought on by this financial crisis. He had shunned the prudent counsel of his father, who had warned Colin and Adam against excessive ambition and had specifically denounced the extravagance of Westlawn, the £7,000 Hamilton estate which Colin had given his wife as a wedding present. The cost appears later to have forced an auction of some of his stock holdings at a large loss. He nevertheless survived the depression of 1837, in which many country clients defaulted, by selling off branch stores and sacrificing real estate. As well, the suppression of the rebellion brought hard currency to loyal businessmen such as Ferrie, who outfitted the 3rd Regiment of Gore militia with clothing, gunpowder, shot, camp ovens, and whisky.

Ferrie never quite regained his early mercantile paramountcy. While other merchants detected a general return of prosperity in 1840, a commercial rival, John Young*, regarded him as a spent force whose "old debts will be worse and worse to collect." Besides old accounts, Colin and Adam Ferrie Jr had additional burdens. The milling and distilling complex at Doon Mills (Kitchener), begun by Adam in 1834, needed costly repairs after a dam collapsed in 1840. Their father was unable to render much aid since two Montreal forwarding firms in which he was involved failed in 1841 and he lost heavily the following year on shipments of produce to Britain. Meanwhile, Isaac Buchanan* had established a large wholesale firm in Hamilton in 1840 and noted later that Colin Ferrie's business began to decline "when exposed to superior competition."

During the 1840s Ferrie turned to banking and real estate speculation on a major scale. The struggling Gore Bank required his increasing attention, particularly as it meshed with his business and land activities. From the outset it was undercapitalized and constantly denied the government business which benefited the Bank of Upper Canada and the Commercial Bank of the Midland District. Ferrie himself was part of the problem since investors and potential clients distrusted the involvement of a reduced merchant in a new bank. In early 1842 Gore Bank shares traded at a discount when it became known that Ferrie, as president, had borrowed about £17,000. The bank purchased property from him in 1844 for a new building directly beside his firm's store, making tangible his strong financial connection with the bank. Apart from his bank shares and his interest in the store and warehouse, his assets were tied up in real estate, which came into his firm's possession as payment from customers and increasingly through speculative investment. As early as 1835 he had advertised farms and urban lots for sale and by 1851 the firm had land valued at over £36,000.

The shock of nearly complete financial collapse after 1839 and persistent business troubles during the early 1840s eclipsed Ferrie's other local interests and shook his youthful confidence. His expansion had a public side, involving the promotion of the town and joint-stock companies, but over-extension, retrenchment, and survival were private matters. Thus for several years he withdrew from public life in order to scramble to meet his obligations, but gradually, as his business recovered, he re-entered civic affairs. He was a founding member of the Hamilton board of trade in 1845 and two years later became first mayor of the newly incorporated city of Hamilton. During his year in office he concentrated on fiscal affairs, which included civic financing by the Gore Bank and an appeal to the provincial government for aid to help the city provide hospital accommodation for the anticipated wave of impoverished Irish immigrants. Ferrie also became involved again in the promotion of joint-stock ventures. Realizing that the enlargement of the Lachine Canal between 1843 and 1848 would permit the operation of large vessels between Montreal and Lake Ontario, he served as chairman of the Burlington Bay Dock and Ship-Building Company, founded in 1847. Although he worked to finance a dockyard and a foundry for the company, no facilities appear to have been built before the company's reorganization in 1858.

The financial crisis of 1848-50, generated in Canada by an international tightening of credit, precipitated Ferrie's final withdrawal from public life. The failure in 1847 of Reid, Irving and Company, the Gore Bank's British agent, had caused the loss of several thousand pounds. Negotiations for a merger with the Bank of Upper Canada were dampened by the Reid, Irving collapse and by the consequent run on the Gore Bank. Persistent merger rumours, however, continued to concern Ferrie, whose easy access to Gore Bank financing was at stake. Once again he had to squeeze debtors, clear off stock, and mortgage property, and in this difficult period he quarrelled with family members over business affairs. Robert Ferrie, the brother who had taken over the management of Doon Mills in 1847, encouraged him to exercise more caution when extending credit and to sell off lots from Westlawn. Perhaps this preoccupation with teetering finances explains Colin's minimal involvement in a major local concern, the Great Western Railway. In 1834 he had been a charter supporter of its predecessor, the London and Gore Rail Road Company, but later seems to have lost much of his enthusiasm. He did join other local businessmen, however, in a bid to consolidate Hamilton's dominance in the vast area north and west of Guelph by supporting the construction of a Great Western feeder from Galt (Cambridge) to Guelph and another branch between Preston and Berlin (Kitchener) which would pass near Doon Mills.

In spite of commercial problems Colin and his father directed the reorganization and expansion of the family business in 1848. Of particular importance was their success in securing control of the Doon Mills from Adam, then in failing health. Following his death the next year, the Hamilton firm was re-formed by Colin with his brothers, John and Robert. During the railway boom in Canada West between 1852 and 1857, the firm appeared to regain much of its initial prestige. An agent for R. G. Dun and Company nevertheless questioned the brothers' ability to "underst[an]d the pres[en] ode of conduct^g bus[iness] as well as many others in the town." In addition, the stress inherent in rebuilding and protecting the family business undermined Colin's health and in 1855 a new series of crises struck his firm. Winter collections turned up an unusual number of bad accounts, two vessels carrying company goods sank on Lake Ontario, and a banking panic similar to that of 1842 broke when Ferrie was rumoured to have had a capital flow problem. At the time, his firm owed the Gore Bank £50,000. Colin met challenges from some of the bank's directors to his management of the bank by having the family purchase more shares, an intricate and, to some, suspicious credit arrangement, especially as family partnerships, under Adam Sr at Montreal and Colin at Hamilton, guaranteed the bills of exchange of each other.

The compounded difficulties were soon offset by general prosperity but the anxiety visibly affected Ferrie. In November 1856, after a meeting with directors of the Gore Bank, he collapsed and within days had died of "an enlargement of the heart." His business interests were continued by John and Robert Ferrie.
John C. Weaver

AO, MS 497; RG 20, Hamilton court records, 1830-40; ser.F-15, 1, 1833-40; RG 22, ser.155, will of C. C. Ferric. BLHU, R. G. Dun & Co. credit ledger, Canada, 25: 111; 26: 13. GRO (Edinburgh), Glasgow, reg. of births and baptisms, May 1808. HPL, Arch. file, Ferrie family papers. PAC, MG 24, D16, 63, John Young to Peter Buchanan, 21 Oct. 1840; Isaac Buchanan to Young, 11 May 1840; 64, Isaac Buchanan to Peter Buchanan, 22 Oct. 1840; D80, 1, memorandum of Isaac Buchanan, 2 April 1845; memorandum on contract for rolling stock, 20 April 1852; memorandum on contract for locomotives, [1852]; RG 5, C1, 202, file 16782; RG 19, 1138, 1141-42. Adam Ferrie, Autobiography, late Hon. Adam Ferrie (n.p., n.d.; copy at MTL). U.C., House of Assembly, App. to the journal, 1835, 1, no.21; 1837-38, 1: 77-131; 1839-40, 1, pt.ii: 31-41. Daily Spectator, and Journal of Commerce, 8, 29 Sept. 1847; 11 Nov. 1856. Hamilton Gazette, and General Advertiser (Hamilton, [Ont.]), 12 Dec. 1835, 6 April 1836. Western Mercury (Hamilton), 13 June 1833; 10 April, 20 June 1834. C. M. Johnston, The Head of the Lake (1967), 326. V. Ross and Trigge, Hist. of Canadian Bank of Commerce, 1: 172-80. P. R. Austin, "Two mayors of early Hamilton," Wentworth Bygones (Hamilton), 3 (1962): 1-9.

Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online 2000 University of Toronto/Université Laval

Colin — Catherine Priscilla Beasley. Catherine (daughter of Colonel Richard Beasley) was born 4 Mar 1812, Burlington, Halton Co., Ontario, Canada; died 10 Mar 1866; was buried , Hamilton Cemetery, Hamilton, Wentworth Co., Ontario. [Group Sheet]

1. Adam Jr. Ferrie was born CA 1835, Of, Hamilton, Wentworth Co., Ontario; died 12 Mar 1857, Hamilton, Wentworth Co., Ontario, Canada.

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• Eby ID Number: Waterloo-113752

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FERRIE, ADAM, industrialist, merchant, shipowner, and politician; b. 15 April 1777 at Irvine, Ayrshire, Scotland, 16th child of James Faerrie and Jean Robertson; d. 24 Dec. 1863 at Hamilton, Canada West.

Unlike most of Montreal's Scottish-born businessmen during the 19th century, Ferrie immigrated when middle-aged, after a highly successful commercial career in Glasgow. In his autobiography he describes the help given him by his father and elder brothers who had been trading successfully for many years to both the East and the West Indies and had interests in London and Liverpool sugar refineries. In 1792, at age 15, Ferrie opened a profitable cotton printing shop at Irvine; by 1799, when he moved to Glasgow, he had three factories in Scotland, and in 1811 he opened another in Manchester, England. His principal outlets were provided by ship captains, including several of his brothers, who accepted his goods on consignment for sale in their ports of call; many cargoes came to Quebec and Montreal. Ferrie himself occasionally visited foreign markets in Europe. By 1815 he had an estate of £70,000 and an annual trade of £100,000. He lost most of his fortune during the next few years, mainly through the failure of business associates whose notes he had endorsed, and he was forced to rebuild by augmenting his consignments to Canada, the Mediterranean, and Brazil. He spent some years in Jamaica attempting to re-establish himself.

In the hope of improving his sales to Canada and establishing his sons, Ferrie in 1824 set up his own firm in Montreal. He formed a partnership with William Cormack who had been associated for many years with Hector Russell and Company, a Montreal dry goods house. In 1825, with £35,000 capital supplied by Ferrie, the new firm, Ferrie, Cormack and Company, to which his son, Colin Campbell, was sent, began business in dry goods, hardware, groceries, and stationery on St Paul Street, Montreal's commercial centre in the early 19th century. Ferrie even built a vessel for the firm's trade, the 300-ton General Wolfe. Heavy initial losses forced him to take charge of the business himself; after a brief visit to Canada in 1826 he moved to Montreal with his family in May 1829.

Ferrie readily saw that western Upper Canada provided a rapidly increasing market for imported manufactured goods and, like a number of his competitors, he decided to establish a branch in that region. His sons Colin Campbell and Adam Jr, who had been in business with their father, chose Hamilton as the base for their Upper Canadian operations, which were now substantial, especially from York (Toronto) to Niagara. Ferrie conducted the Montreal end of the business, and his sons built up a profitable trade in the Hamilton area, establishing branch stores in nearby Preston (Cambridge), Brantford, Nelson, and Dundas during the early 1830s.

At Montreal, Ferrie, in addition to imports, was also involved heavily in exporting. He suffered enormous losses on flour, pork, beef, and butter shipments to Great Britain in 1842, but apparently recovered later to a level of considerable comfort. Suffering again through the bankruptcy of friends, Ferrie took an interest in revisions of bankruptcy legislation during the early 1840s. A supporter of the Montreal Committee of Trade, Ferrie took an active part in organizing it as the Board of Trade in 1842.

An outspoken radical reformer in Scotland, Ferrie eschewed any affiliation with Lower Canadian radicals during the troubled 1830s. In the organizations to which he belonged, such as the Constitutional Association, he counselled firm but balanced loyalism, to keep "the furiously loyal within moderate bounds as to their hatred of the French Canadians." Most loyalists in Montreal, he later recalled, "were so prejudiced as to assert that [French Canadians] were all traitors in their hearts whatever they might pretend." Ferrie earned little thanks for urging his friends to be less virulent and for the open contempt shown to the activities of the "set of silly puppies calling themselves the Doric Club."

Ferrie maintained the same independence and determined loyalism combined with a strong distrust of most politicians during his career in public life. In 1840 he was appointed by Lord Sydenham [Thomson*] to the municipal council governing Montreal and served on a number of committees until his resignation in 1843. Appointed also to the Legislative Council in 1841, he remained a member until his death. He seems to have regarded these honours more as duties, that of councillor, with its high costs of living away from home, being an expensive one. Despite his strong reform sympathies, Ferrie quickly developed a pronounced distaste for most Canadian Reformers. Reflecting later on the politics of the late 1840s and early 1850s, he remembered only "bickerings and low personalities between the place men and the place hunters, between the 'ins' and 'outs.'" Francis Hincks* and Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine were "pretended Liberals" and "base creatures" who "seemed so wholly corrupt as to be insensible to shame."

Aside from his support of the St Andrew's Society, which he helped to organize in 1834, Ferrie directed his philanthropic efforts into unusual projects. He assisted personally in helping cholera-stricken immigrants in 1832 and 1834; during the 1830s he took a leading part in attempting to relieve the city's poor of high bread and fuel costs inflicted by combines of bakers and fuel dealers. From 1837 to 1840 he headed the committee managing the Montreal Public Bakery, a cooperative established to produce bread for sale "at the cheapest possible rate." The bakers countered by selling at less than cost and forced the cooperative out of business. A woodyard he established on a similar basis also collapsed with Ferrie personally bearing a substantial loss.

Ferrie invested little in the Montreal railway schemes of that era, but had strong interests in banking. He was active in the formation of the City Bank of Montreal, was a large shareholder in Hamilton's Gore Bank, and supported the City and District Savings Bank of Montreal. His other joint-stock ventures included the Ottawa and Rideau Forwarding Company, the Montreal Fire Assurance Company, and the Montreal Gas Company.

His wife, Rachel Campbell, had 12 children of whom six survived infancy. As most of them settled in Hamilton, Ferrie decided to retire there and in 1853, at age 76, he left Montreal, one suspects without much regret. He died in Hamilton on Christmas eve, 1863.
Gerald Tulchinsky

[Adam Ferrie], Autobiography, late Hon. Adam Ferrie (n.p.,n.d.); Letter to the Rt. Hon. Earl Grey, one of her majesty's most honorable Privy Council and secretary of state for colonial affairs; embracing a statement of facts in relation to emigration to Canada during the summer of 1847 (Montreal, 1847). General Register Office (Edinburgh), Register of births and baptisms for the parish of Irvine. HPL, Ferrie papers, inventory. McGill University Libraries, Dept. of Rare Books and Special Coll., ms coll., Ottawa and Rideau Forwarding Company, minutes of meeting, 29 March 1837. PAC, MG 24, B1, 11. Hamilton Spectator, 29 Dec. 1863. Montreal Gazette, 29 Dec. 1863. Montreal Transcript, 21 Jan. 1840. Morning Courier (Montreal), 20 June 1849. Montreal directory, 1841-53. Political appointments, 1841-65 (J.-O. Coté), 55. G. Turcotte, Cons. législatif de Québec, 132-33.
Campbell, History of Scotch Presbyterian Church, 487. Hist. de la corporation de la cité de Montréal (Lamothe et al.), 204. Adrien Leblond de Brumath, Histoire populaire de Montréal depuis son origine jusqu'à nos jours (Montréal, 1890), 370. T. T. Smyth, The first hundred years; history of the Montreal City and District Savings Bank, 1846-1946 (n.p., n.d.), 14-15. F.-J. Audet, "1842," Cahiers des Dix, 7 (1942), 241. "Origins of the Montreal Board of Trade," Journal of Commerce (Gardenvale, Que.), 2nd ser., LV (April 1927), 28-29. Adam Shortt, "Founders of Canadian banking: the Hon. Adam Ferrie, reformer, merchant and financier," Canadian Bankers' Assoc., Journal (Toronto), XXXII (1924-25), 50-63.

Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online 2000 University of Toronto/Université Laval

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Adam — Rachel Campbell. Rachel was born 1787, , Scotland; died 24 Dec 1868, Hamilton, Wentworth Co., Ontario, Canada. [Group Sheet]

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• Name: Rachel Ferrie
• Eby ID Number: Waterloo-115251