EARLY DAYS From Klondike to Westboro: How coal and lumber shaped western Ottawa

BY DAVE ALLSTON

Twenty years have passed since ground was broken for the Metropole building. At the time it was Ottawa's tallest residential building and the most iconic in Westboro. It ultimately became the harbinger of Scott Street’s future.

But long before the Metropole the site was home to Independent Coal and Lumber. This significant player in Ottawa’s industrial history became part of Westboro’s story because of the Yukon Gold Rush.

It began during the First World War, when access to coal became a west end issue. Westboro had ballooned in size over 15 years, but infrastructure lagged.

When the war put further strain on coal, supply prices skyrocketed. Delivery costs made things especially difficult for “suburban” Westboro. Not to mention M.N Cummings, the community’s lone coal dealer who was accused of “holding up soldiers’ wives for their last dollar.” More likely, his supply sources had dwindled.

In October 1919, the Independent Coal Company, located at Bank and Queen, was sold to Michael Ambrose Mahoney, also known as “Klondike Mike.”

Mahoney was known across North America for his gold rush rags-to-riches story. The Buckingham teen worked at lumber camps in Gatineau and Madawaska in the 1890s before heading off to Yukon in 1897 with a railway ticket, a suitcase and three dollars.

After failing to get a stake in Skagway, Dawson City, Dominion Creek, Nome and Fairbanks, he was close to giving up. But then he struck a claim that yielded

$175,000 in gold, the largest shipment ever handled by an individual miner.

Mahoney returned to Ottawa in 1912 and partnered with George A. Rich two years later. They had staked Klondike claims side by side, and together they started Mahoney and Rich, Ltd., a team of excavators and building contractors which also handled trucking with their large fleet.

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