Henry Mill Pellatt, 1859-1939

Major-General Sir Henry Mill Pellatt, CVO (January 6, 1859 – March 8, 1939) was a Canadian financier and soldier.[1] He is notable for his role in bringing hydro-electricity to Toronto for the first time, and also for his large château in Toronto, called Casa Loma, which was the biggest private residence ever constructed in Canada. Casa Loma would eventually become a well-known landmark of the city. His summer home and farm in King City later became Marylake Augustinian Monastery.

Pellatt was also a noted supporter of the Boy Scouts of Canada. His first wife, Mary, was the first Chief Commissioner of the Girl Guides of Canada.
Pellatt was born in Kingston, Canada West (now Ontario), the son of Henry Pellatt (1830–1909), a Glasgow-born stockbroker in Toronto,[2] and Emma Mary Pellatt (née Holland). His great-grandfather was the glassmaker Apsley Pellatt.[3]

Pellatt had three sisters and two brothers, Fred Pellatt (grandfather of Toronto-based freelance writer John Pellatt) and Mill Pellatt (father of Mary Katherine Pellatt).[citation needed] The latter brother was paymaster of the Toronto Electric Light Company, a job obtained for him by Pellatt. His sisters were Mary Kate, Marian Maria and Emily Mountford Pellatt. One of his nieces, Beatrix Hamilton, was married to Canadian economist and humourist Stephen Leacock.

He was educated at Upper Canada College before leaving in 1876 to join his father's stock brokerage company, Pellatt and Osler, as a clerk. In 1882, Pellatt's father and Sir Edmund Boyd Osler parted ways, and Pellatt completed his apprenticeship and became a full member of the stock exchange. In the following year, Pellatt's father set up a partnership with his son under the name Pellatt and Pellatt.

Pellatt married twice, first to Mary Dodgson in Toronto in 1882 and, after Mary's death in 1924, to Catharine Welland Merritt in Toronto in 1927 (which lasted until her death in 1929). With his first wife, he had one son, Reginald Pellatt (1885-1967), who was a Colonel and married with no children.[4]
Pellatt enlisted as a rifleman with The Queen's Own Rifles of Canada on 2 November 1876.[5] He rose through the ranks and eventually became the Commanding Officer. In 1905, he was created a Knight Bachelor by King Edward VII for his service with The Queen's Own Rifles of Canada.

In 1910, Pellatt took the entire 600-man regiment (including its horses) to England for military training at his expense, to mark the Regiment's 50th anniversary. The military exercises lasted from August 13 to October 3, 1910.

Pellatt later served as the regiment's Honorary Colonel and was promoted to the rank of Major-General upon his retirement from the regiment. In addition, he was made a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (CVO) in 1910.

From 1911 to 1923, he was the Knight Principal of the Imperial Society of Knights Bachelor.
Much of Pellatt's fortune was made through investments in the railway and hydro-electric industries in Canada, including the Toronto Electric Light Company. He also made significant investment in the Cobalt Lake Mining Company during the Cobalt silver rush of 1903. Later in around 1915, using riches from his Cobalt Lake Mining Company, he invested in the fledging McIntyre Mines in Timmins Ontario. However, legislator Adam Beck launched a campaign against the great industrialists of Canada, proclaiming that hydro power "should be as free as air". This quote is from James Pliny Whitney. [6] Through legislative process and by whipping up anti-rich sentiment, Beck was able to successfully appropriate Pellatt's life work and take his electric companies from him.[citation needed] Beck then led a populist revolt to raise Pellatt's taxes on his castle, Casa Loma, from $600 per year to $12,000.[citation needed] The strain of losing all of his income, coupled with the large increase in property taxes for his castle, led him to rely solely on his real estate investments, which were unsuccessful due to the beginning of the First World War. After the province expropriated his electrical power generating business[citation needed], and his aircraft manufacturing business was appropriated by Beck as part of the war effort during the First World War, Pellatt was driven to near-bankruptcy, which forced him and Lady Pellatt to leave Casa Loma in 1923. They therefore moved to their farm at Marylake in King City.

Prior to building Casa Loma, Pellatt sold his summer retreat in Blantyre / Fallingbrook area of southwest Scarborough to his son Reginald and other parts of the estate to others; Chateau des Quatre Vents at 3025 Queen Street East was built in 1892 by William T. Murray on land acquired from Pellatt former summer estate.[7] E.J. Lennox built another home in front of 3025 and signed as 3027 Queen Street East in 1910. The estate was once on land owned by Peter Patterson and before that Clergy Reserve.[8] Only the groundskeeper home remains and rest of the estate redeveloped into residential homes. His summer estate was destroyed in a fire in the 1920s.[9]

Pellatt later built Bailey House in Mimico, at the bend in Lake Shore near Fleeceline, overlooking the commercial stretch on Lake Shore (the house later became a Legion Hall and was demolished to make way for a roadway). He subsequently moved in with his chauffeur, Thomas Ridgway, and it was in this house that Pellatt died.[10]

After he died on March 8, 1939, thousands of people lined Toronto streets to witness his funeral procession, and he was buried with full military honours.[11] He is interred at Forest Lawn Mausoleum, north of Toronto.

His life has been featured in the film The Pellatt Newsreel, which aired on the Biography Channel and was nominated for a 2009 Gemini for Best Biography Documentary.[12] The film, narrated by Colin Mochrie, is shown continuously in the theatre at Casa Loma, which is located where the swimming pool was planned to be.

Several biographies have been written about Pellatt. In particular, Carlie Oreskovich's The King of Casa Loma gives a detailed and thorough account. His first wife's great-grandniece, Trelawny Linda Howell, also curates a website dedicated to his memory, CasaLomaTrust.ca.[13]

Born in 1859, Pellatt was educated at the Model School of Upper Canada in Toronto. He attended Upper Canada College for three months, and then quit to join his father's stockbroker's firm Pellatt and Osler, as a junior accounting clerk. He was known as a athlete at school, and in the years 1878-79 won many running races in the one mile category, setting a record which stood for seventy-five years until broken by Roger Bannister at the Empire Games.


In 1882 he became a full member of the Toronto Stock Exchange, and married his first wife Mary Dodgson. In 1883 his father dissolved his partnership with Osler, and the two formed the firm Pellatt and Pellatt. Pellatt was Vice-President and a Board member of Manufacturer's Life Insurance Co. Ltd., which was investigated in 1906 for fraud, and Pellatt was afterwards limited in his insurance business transactions by law. In 1883 he was involved in establishing the Toronto Electric Light Company, which obtained contracts for the manufacture of street lights. This company later joined with the Canadian General Electric Co. to form the Electric Development Company, which spent five years constructing an electrical generating plant at Niagara Falls. When the Hydro-electric Power Commission of Ontario was formed in 1906 to make hydro-electric power a public utility, the Electric Development Company was put into financial difficulty and eventually closed in 1922. Pellatt was also involved in Brazilian power and transportation developments, through Brascan Ltd., the beet root sugar industry, the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad, the mining industry at Cobalt, and he also set up the Kitsumkallum Timber Company. By 1913, he was one of the 23 Canadian capitalists dealing on the stock market who were said to control the economy of the country. By this time he also held 23 directorships, two of which were financial, six dealt with transportation, 11 were with industrial interests, and two were with insurance companies.


Between the two of them, Henry Pellatt Sr. and Henry Pellatt Jr. bought: the steamboat Lorna Doone, the residence Southwood Hall, north of Orillia, the residence Cliffside, near Balmy Beach in Scarborough, a home on Sherbourne St., two farms in Whitby and Port Credit, and other property. In 1909 Pellatt Jr. used his own money to send an entire regiment of the Queen's Own Rifles (of which he became a full Major in 1895) to the Alderstat manoeuvres in England for seven weeks. He also funded various non- profit organizations, such as: the Victorian Order of Nurses, Grace Hospital, St. James Cathedral, St. Peter's, St. Bartholomew's, St. Simon's, and Trinity College. In 1914 he was given a chair of philosophy at King's College of Windsor, Nova Scotia. He was knighted in 1905.


Work on his castle, Casa Loma, began in 1909, when E.J. Lennox drew up the first basement plan. Construction was underway in 1910, and the first stone was laid in 1911. Pellatt took up residence in 1914, although work on Casa Loma and its grounds continued for some time afterwards.


By 1913, Pellatt's wealth began to decline, and assessments of Casa Loma for tax purposes greatly increased. In 1915, he backed a small aviation company, but his last major business deal was in the development of La Paz oil, which eventually collapsed. By 1923 he left Casa Loma, and declared bankruptcy with the collapse of the Home Bank of Canada. In 1924, the contents of Casa Loma were sold off, and the building itself went into disrepair. In 1937 the Kiwanis Club of West Toronto took over Casa Loma as a tourist attraction, charging twenty-five cents per person, which saved Casa Loma from destruction.


In 1927, three years after the death of his first wife, Pellatt married Catherine Welland Merritt, who later died in 1929. Pellatt was further weakened by the stock market crash of 1929, and by 1938 he was living in a rented house in Mimico with his chauffeur's family. After a three week illness, Pellatt died on March 8, 1939.