Bowmanville. William Humber

years later when it became a town.¹⁴ Thus began its period of political independence. Ironically, in its political realignment within the new ward boundaries of Clarington proposed in 1996, Bowmanville returned to a position of political submergence within what had once been Darlington Township.

      As residents of Bowmanville looked forward in the 1850s a period of growth, prosperity, and unlimited ambition lay ahead.

      Notes

      ¹ Squair, The Townships of Darlington and Clarke, p.43.

      ² Hamlyn, Lunney, and Morrison, Bowmanville: A Retrospect. (Bowmanville Centennial Committee, 1958), p. 1.

      ³ “It may be appropriate to note here that, of these three families, it was the Burks who were most closely associated with the development of what we now know as Bowmanville.” From Hamlyn, Lunney and Morrison, Bowmanville: A Retrospect, p. 1.

      ⁴ Historical Atlas of Northumberland and Durham Counties. (H. Belden and Co. 1878), p. 44.

      ⁵ Squair, The Townships of Darlington and Clarke, p. 53.

      ⁶ Hamlyn, Lunney and Morrison, Bowmanville: A Retrospect, p. 5.

      ⁷ Squair, The Townships of Darlington and Clarke, p. 56.

      ⁸ Fairbairn, History and Reminiscences of Bowmanville, p. 39.

      ⁹ Hamlyn, Lunney and Morrison, Bowmanville: A Retrospect, p. 5.

      ¹⁰ Heritage Walking Tour of Historic Bowmanville, The Belvedere. (Quarterly Journal of the Bowmanville Museum) No. 1. (Bowmanville Museum: 1993), p. 14.

      ¹¹ “. . . we need not be too embarrassed when visitors to our town express surprise at our eccentric street system; the old section of the city of Boston has much this type of thing and Bostonians tend to regard it with a touch of civic pride . . .” from Hamlyn, Lunney and Morrison, Bowmanville: A Retrospect, pp. 4-5.

      ¹² Squair, The Townships of Darlington and Clarke, p. 53.

      ¹³ Ibid, pp. 43-44.

      ¹⁴ Two Centuries of Change: United Counties of Northumberland and Durham 1767-1967. (Cobourg: 1967), p. 27.

      Chapter Five

      Our Bank

       “The study of history can be very therapeutic, it’s far better than the couch.”

      – Harvey Dyck, discoverer of Mennonite Archives in the Ukraine

      John Simpson began his working career as a young clerk in Charles Bowman’s small store in Darlington Mills. The enterprise gave credit allowing new pioneers to survive and a grateful community took Bowman’s name. It was an important lesson for young Simpson. Hence, in 1856 when he was approached by Montreal businessmen connected with the Montreal City and District Savings Bank who were proposing a bank for Bowmanville, he agreed. In 1857 Simpson became the first president of the chartered Ontario Bank with a capital of $400,000.¹

      It was a bank that would support small merchants and farmers whose credit was several times better than the amount requested, but whose occasional shortfalls were annoying to traditional bankers. Simpson hated these ogres of finance and hoped to drive out their ultimate practitioner, the Bank of Montreal, for whom he had been local manager.

      Simpson, a liberal within a Conservative company, was not adverse to using the bank to forward his own political interests. He was free in dispensing loans from the new bank sometimes to men with little credit but much influence in the game of politics. One of his “shopping” trips, however, landed a large lumber group who added their accounts to the bank.

      Such matters, however, were perhaps part of the bank’s successful camouflage of its real power which lay in Montreal among its more significant investors. These included sixteen Québec patrons owning more than one hundred and twenty-five shares as against only five investors in Bowmanville, three from Oshawa and one from Whitby. Nevertheless, the myth of Bowmanville’s supremacy in the new bank continued for many years. Farmers had more confidence in an institution whose directors were visible on local streets. According to Leo Johnson, “So concerned were the shareholders of the Ontario Bank that it appear as a local enterprise, that in the first twenty years of its existence (while its head office was in Bowmanville) it was never admitted in public that the bank was controlled from Montreal. It was always referred to in the local press as Our Bank.”²

      This image was powerful enough to imbue the small town with the kind of prestige and glory which could attract and support other business enterprises. Bowmanville had every reason to believe that it was on its way to becoming a major centre in Ontario. After all, it was about the same distance to Toronto as Hamilton was in the west.

      What has been described as “the most beautiful commercial building in Bowmanville”, and which no longer exists—the Ontario Bank building—which stood on the north side of King Street, just west of Temperance. This picture dates back to circa 1910.

      The Bank continued to grow by supporting new branches in other centres which locally included Whitby, Oshawa, Port Hope, Port Perry and Lindsay, and more distantly but perhaps importantly, Montreal. In 1869 the owners attempted to move the bank’s headquarters to Toronto, a much larger centre with better financial prospects, but the merchants and farmers of Bowmanville and area still held some influence and power. The head office remained in Bowmanville for another five years.

      As glorious as this brief history was, it reflected the behind the scenes reality of Bowmanville’s loss of urban fortune to Toronto and its failure to establish a regional prowess. Some minor form, however, was recognized by the beautiful bank building constructed in 1866 which should have remained a community symbol forever. Eventually, the Ontario Bank did relocate to Toronto. In 1882 Alexander Fisher, brother of David who built the house that eventually became the Bowmanville Museum, blew his brains out after realizing that the money he had embezzled for friends and relatives abroad had been discovered. Then, in 1890 Roily Moffat, accountant in the Toronto branch and an investor in the Toronto Baseball Club was found to have directed significant bank dollars to Chicago stocks. He would serve several years in the Kingston Pen and then leave the country.

      By 1906 the bank had invested heavily in speculative stocks to restore previous losses, at least partially the result of embezzled dollars. The bank sank deeply into debt, in a manner similar to the contemporary disaster that befell Barings Bank in Britain in the 1990s. Finally, the Ontario Bank collapsed and its assets were assumed by the very institution Simpson had fled, the Bank of Montreal.

      Until then folks in Bowmanville might have wondered why so much of their local capital invested in the bank failed to resurface in community initiatives. Now they knew it had always been redirected to the majority interest in Montreal. From now on they could at least be certain that their profits and investment would reside in the Québec city.

      John Simpson’s legacy, however, continues to this day. His son, D. Burke Simpson, spent time in a New York sanatorium for the treatment of tuberculosis, but he survived to become a prominent local lawyer with provincial and national connections. His accomplishments included attendance at a meeting in 1890 at which the Ontario Hockey Association, the precursor for all later hockey organizations, was formed.³ When he died, his law practice was assumed by a young lawyer from Perth, Ontario, W. Ross Strike, who later became chairman of Ontario Hydro. He passed his firm on to his son, Al, who in the 1990s was joined by his own sons.

      Notes

      ¹ Much of the information in this chapter is derived from The Belvedere (Quarterly Journal of the Bowmanville Museum) No. 3. (Bowmanville Museum:1990).

      ² Leo Johnson, History of the County of Ontario 1615-1875, pp. 248-249.

      ³