Henry Mill Pellatt, 1859-1939

Born in 1859, Henry 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.