William Workman: Public Successes, Personal Problems

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The Workman family plot in Montreal’s Mount Royal Cemetery is a large one, including six large tombstones engraved with the names of almost 30 people. But William Workman (1807-1878), a successful businessman who served as mayor of Montreal for three years, is not buried there. He was laid to rest alone, in a large mausoleum some distance from the family plot.

Before I started researching the Workmans, a cemetery staff member told me that William had wanted family members to be buried in the mausoleum with him, but they refused. Neither of us knew why, but now I have an idea.  

William Workman, 1866, Montreal, QC, William Notman Studio, McCord Stewart Museum online collection, I-22186.1.

Born in 1807, William was the fifth of nine children. The family lived near Belfast, in what is now Northern Ireland, where his father was a teacher and estate manager. In 1819, William’s oldest brother, Benjamin, immigrated to Montreal. Three brothers followed soon after and, in 1829, the rest of the family moved to what was then Lower Canada.1 Before emigrating, William worked as a surveyor for the Royal Engineers, mapping Ireland for the Ordnance Survey project. In Montreal, his first job was as assistant editor of theCanadian Courant and Montreal Advertiser, a weekly newspaper owned by brother Benjamin. Soon, however, William found his true calling: as a businessman.

Montreal Gazette, June 6, 1859, Newspapers.com, entry for Frothingham and Workman

He found employment with a hardware firm, Frothingham & Co., and within a few years he became a partner. As of 1836, the company was known as Frothingham and Workman, and it became the largest wholesale hardware company in Canada, selling scythes, shovels, augers and nails. When William retired from the hardware business in 1859, his brother Thomas took over running the company.2

Montreal was growing rapidly, and William found opportunities to invest in fields such as banking, transportation and real estate. William was elected president of the City Bank in 1849 and served in that capacity until 1874.3 In 1846 he was one of a group of prominent Montrealers who founded the City and District Savings Bank, established to help ordinary people save their money, and he was president of that institution for several years.

William invested in Canada’s first railway, the Champlain and St Lawrence, completed in 1836 to connect Montreal to Saint-Jean on the Richelieu River.4 He was also a shareholder in the St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad, and he collaborated with several other individuals to found the Canadian Ocean Steam Navigation Company in 1854.

Around 1850, he and a business partner became real estate developers. They bought a piece of land south-west of Montreal’s city limits, near the Lachine Canal. The canal attracted industries such as brass foundries and rolling mills, and nearby manufacturing facilities belonging to Frothingham and Workman employed hundreds of people. The partners laid out streets, built sewers and divided the property into housing lots. The area, known as Sainte-Cunégonde, became a village in 1876 and a tiny independent city in 1890, but eventually it became part of the City of Montreal.5 Workman Street, named after William, still exists in the area.

William was also a generous philanthropist. He was president of the St. Patrick’s Society at a time when that organization was involved with both the Roman Catholic and Protestant communities. Later, he supported the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society. In 1864, he helped create the Montreal Protestant House of Industry and Refuge, serving as president from 1874 to 1877. He was also president of the Montreal Dispensary and Hospital for Sick Children.

He was not deeply involved in politics, but he was elected mayor of Montreal from 1868 to 1872 and proved to be very popular. This aspect of his life will be the topic of another story.

Frothingham and Workman, Iron Mongers, Montreal, John Henry Walker, McCord Stewart Museum online collection, M930.50.7309.

Around this time, wealthy merchants began building large homes on the slopes of Mount Royal, an area that became known as the Golden Square Mile. William bought a full block on the north side of Sherbrooke Street, between Drummond and Stanley, and built a mansion he called Mount Prospect.

William Workman and Elizabeth (Eliza) Bethell were married at St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church on February 10, 1831. Eliza came from the same part of Ireland where William had grown up, so perhaps they had known each other there. They had seven children, so the house should have been full of activity, but it didn’t turn out that way.

It was all too common for children to die young in 19th century Montreal, and William and Eliza lost three little ones. Their firstborn, Elizabeth, was born in December 1831 and died the following summer. Their third child, Emma, was born in August 1837 and died in April 1839. Another girl, Malvina, was born in July 1845 and died in April 1847. Two daughters, Louise (or Louisa) and Elizabeth (Eliza), grew to adulthood, but Eliza, who married Robert Moat, died in 1871. Louisa married Joel C. Baker, a lawyer who went into the hardware business with Louise’s uncle Henry Mulholland. But William found the death of his only son, also named William (1840-1865), the most devastating blow of all. By then, he and his wife may have already been living apart.

“Plan of property belonging to the Estate of the Late W. Workman Esq. subdivided into lots.” H.M. Perrault, 20 Novembre, 1879; Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, entry for William Workman, https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/3394052?docsearchtext=William%20Workman

An image of the 1861 census suggests that Eliza was not living at Mount Prospect house, but with her married daughter Louisa Baker and her husband,6 so perhaps William and Eliza had unofficially separated by then. In the 1871 census, seven people were listed as living at Mount Prospect, including a cook, a coachman and a horseman. William was the only family member listed.

In a book about William’s brother, The Father of Canadian Psychiatry, Joseph Workman, author Christine Johnston remarked that Joseph did not have a high opinion of William, commenting in his diary that he thought Wiliam had damage in his head, as well as bumps outside it.7 Perhaps William was also concerned about his own mental health: Johnson wrote that William visited a phrenologist in the United States to examine those external bumps. Johnston also noted that family records suggested William was an alcoholic. If true, that might explain the difficulties in the Workman household.

Nevertheless, many people admired him. When he died, Montreal’s English-language newspapers published extensive obituaries, describing William’s many accomplishments as well as the long and painful illness that led to his death.8 According to one newspaper account, some 400 people attended his funeral at St. James the Apostle Anglican Church, and many followed the hearse to Mount Royal Cemetery.

William Workman seemed to have everything, but without his family surrounding and supporting him, his life appears to have been a sad one, and those problems followed him to the grave.

This article is also posted on the collaborative blog https://GenealogyEnsemble.com  

Notes

William’s sister Ann (1809-1882), who married hardware merchant Henry Mulholland, was my great-great-grandmother.

Some photos of brother Thomas Workman’s house on Sherbrooke Street are erroneously identified as William’s house. I have not found a photo of Mount Prospect.

There are several photographs of a young man identified as William Workman in the McCord Stewart Museum’s online photo collection. This must the son who died in 1865.  

Phrenology was a popular pseudoscience in the 19th century. Its proponents believed that the measurements of the skull were indicative of mental faculties and character traits.

See also:

Benjamin Workman: Leading the Way, Writing Up the Ancestors, March 12, 2025, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2025/03/benjamin-workman-md-leading-the-way.html

“Dr. Joseph Workman, Pioneer in the Treatment of Mental Illness” Writing Up the Ancestors, Oct 26, 2017, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2017/10/dr-joseph-workman-mental-health-pioneer.html

“The Miller of Moneymore”, Writing Up the Ancestors, May 14, 2025,      https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2025/05/the-miller-of-moneymore.html

“Henry Mulholland, Hardware Merchant”, Writing Up the Ancestors, March 17, 2016,  https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2016/03/henry-mulholland-montreal-hardware.html

Mulholland Bros. Hardware Merchants, Writing Up the Ancestors, Jan. 15, 2025, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2025/01/mulholland-bros-hardware-merchants.html

“The World of Mrs. Murray Smith”,  Writing Up the Ancestors, Feb.24, 2016, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2016/02/the-small-world-of-mrs-murray-smith.html

Sources:

1.   Christine Johnston. “The Irish Connection: Benjamin and Joseph and Their Brothers and their Coats of Many Colours,” CUUHS Meeting, May 1982, Paper #4, p. 2. 

 2.  John Frothingham, Obituary. The Portland Daily Press, May 24, 1870, p. 3. Newspapers.com, accessed Jan. 5, 2026.

3. Nicholas Flood Davin, The Irishman in Canada, London: S. Low, Marston, 1877, p. 334, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/irishmanincanada00daviuoft/page/334/mode/2up accessed Jan. 5, 2026.

4. G. Tulchinsky, “Workman, William,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 10, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–,  https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/workman_william_10E.html accessed January 5, 2026

5. Olivier Paré, “Les bâtisseurs de la Petite-Bourgoyge” Encyclopédie du MEM, https://ville.montreal.qc.ca/memoiresdesmontrealais/les-batisseurs-de-la-petite-bourgogne5 accessed Jan. 5, 2026.

6. Ancestry.ca, 1861 Census of Canada. entry for Joel C. Baker, Canada East, Montreal. Library and Archives Canada, Canada East Census, 1861, p. 4210. accessed Jan. 6, 2026.

7. Christine I. M. Johnston, The Father of Canadian Psychiatry: Joseph Workman, Victoria: The Ogden Press, 2000, p. 122. 

8. “Late William Workman”, The Gazette, Feb. 25, 1878, p. 2. Newspapers.com, accessed Dec. 30, 2015. 

Huntly Ward Davis, Montreal Architect

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with additional research by Justin Bur

Huntly Ward Davis (1875-1952) was a Montreal architect who designed elegant downtown homes, banks and institutional buildings in the first half of the 20th century. Some of those buildings still stand today, others have disappeared. Many of Montreal’s heritage buildings, built when the city was Canada’s most important business and banking center, have been demolished and replaced by high-rise office towers and apartment buildings. As a result, Davis has been largely forgotten by the public, but his descendants – my cousins – are proud of his architectural legacy.

Huntly Ward Davis. Bagg family collection

Huntly was born in Montreal on October 22, 1875, the oldest son of Moses Davis (c. 1847-1909), head of a customs brokerage firm, and Lucy Elizabeth Ward (1850-1924). Moses was originally from St. Andrews, Quebec, a village on the Ottawa River between Ottawa and Montreal.1  

His mother’s father was well known in business and in politics. James Kewley Ward (1819-1910), was born on the Isle of Man, located in the Irish Sea. James immigrated to New York State in 1842 and married his first wife, Elizabeth King, there. The family moved to Lower Canada in the early 1850s and James bought a lumber mill on the Maskinongé River, northeast of Montreal.

Elizabeth died when daughter Lucy was four years old. James remarried and he and his second wife, Lydia Trenholm, had a large family. Lucy’s granddaughter later recalled how warm and compassionate Lucy was, so perhaps she grew up helping her younger siblings.

In the 1870s, the Ward family moved to Montreal, where James opened a sawmill on the Lachine Canal and expanded his business interests to cotton. A Liberal in politics, he served as mayor of the village of Côte St. Antoine (now the City of Westmount) from 1875 to 1884, and in 1888 he was appointed to the Legislative Council of Quebec. He was known for his generosity to charities.2

Moses Davis and Lucy Ward were married in Montreal in 1874, and Huntly, the eldest of their three sons, was born the following year. Huntly attended school in Montreal, then studied architecture in Boston, graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1898. He returned to Montreal and eventually went into partnership with architect Morley Hogle. After Hogle’s sudden death in 1920, Huntly worked on his own.3 He was a member of the Quebec Association of Architects and of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.

This house at 1814 Sherbrooke Street West was designed by Hogle and Davis in 1908. The ground floor window was added later. The photo, taken in 1986, is from the Repetoire d’architecture traditionelle sur le territoire de la Communaute Urbaine de Montreal, Architecture domestique I, les residences.

Huntly married Evelyn St. Clair Stanley Bagg (1883-1970), eldest daughter of Robert Stanley Bagg and his wife Clara Smithers, on Oct. 26, 1910, at Montreal’s Anglican Church of St. James the Apostle. The following day, The Gazette’s society reporter called the event “one of the prettiest of the season’s fashionable weddings” and described the bride’s ivory satin gown, embroidered with seed pearls.4

Huntly and Evelyn lived in an apartment building that Huntly had designed on Summerhill Avenue, a short street off Côte des Neiges Road, just up the hill from the house where Evelyn had grown up. Evelyn lived on Summerhill for the rest of her life and the couple’s granddaughter still remembers the spacious eight-room apartment and the furniture Huntly had designed.

Huntly and Evelyn also had a country house at Ste. Marguerite, in the Laurentian mountains north of the city. That was where Huntly died, suddenly, on October 12, 1952, at age 76.5 His name is on a plaque in the Bagg family mausoleum at Mount Royal Cemetery.

Huntly and Evelyn had one daughter, Clare Ward Davis (1911-2007). As an adult, she often repeated expressions she had learned from him as a child that reflected his simple sense of justice: “never assume”; “I divide, you choose”; and “a nectarine is a plum’s mistake”.

This down-to-earth approach to life was also reflected in the buildings he designed. Son-in-law Norton Fellowes, who was also a Montreal architect, prepared an obituary of Huntly, focusing on his professional activities and published in the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Journal.

Norton wrote, “In the early years of the 20th century, Mr. Davis was a ‘contemporary architect’ for during this era of post-Victorian vulgarity, he allied himself with that small group of young architects who saw beyond the ornate fashion of the day and consistently designed quiet, dignified town houses, country homes, banks and institutes of learning, always in the tradition of fine craftsmanship and classical proportion. The Greenshield and Townsend country houses still grace the bays of Lake Manitou in the Laurentians and the main building of the Children’s Memorial Hospital, the Trafalgar Institute, the Walter Molson residence on McGregor Street, and the head office of the Bank of Toronto in Montreal are all still permanent monuments to a man who followed the highest traditions of the profession.

“During the last few years, although well beyond the age when others retire, Mr. Davis, at the age of 75, was still young enough to understand the trend to more functional design and it was not surprising that in 1952, he designed and supervised the building of several small, efficient new branches for the Bank of Toronto in the Montreal area. Mr. Davis thus worked with dignity and courage for a full half century as a member of the architectural profession.”6

Hogle and Davis designed this building as a branch of the Bank of Toronto in the eastern part of Montreal. Source: l’Atelier d’histoire Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve (AHMHM)

Neither is it surprising that he designed at least one building for his wife’s family. The Bagg family had extensive properties in Montreal, mostly in the Mile End area, just east of Mount Royal, but they also owned a few properties downtown. In 1926, Huntly designed a brown brick apartment block on Ste-Catherine Street West, near Guy, for the Stanley Bagg Corp. It was three stories, with small shops on the ground floor.

He may have been involved with another project on land that belonged to the Baggs, a commercial building at the southwest corner of Ste-Catherine Street and Peel. It was built in 1911, shortly after Huntly and Evelyn were married, however, no architect’s name was mentioned in any newspaper reports or in the building’s lease. All building permits were destroyed in a 1922 fire at city hall.

The gleaming, white vitrified terracotta façade (a treatment popular between 1910 and 1915) of the H&M clothing store still stands out at this busy intersection in the heart of downtown. Thousands of people pass by it every day. Although his name was never officially associated with it, this may be the most familiar building Huntly designed.

Notes

Some sources, including the Biographical Dictionary of Architects of Canada, spell his name Huntley, however, his baptism record and a letter written by his mother spell it Huntly. I have used his mother’s spelling. Most architectural references say H.W. Davis.

The lot on Ste-Catherine just west of Guy (St. Antoine Ward, lot 1679, minus a strip of land previously detached for a laneway,) was purchased by the Estate of the late Stanley Clark Bagg in 1885, probably as a rent-generating property. At the time, a three-story brick building and several other buildings were on the lot. The property passed to the Stanley Bagg Corp. when it was founded in 1919. The current building, designed by Huntly Ward Davis, was constructed in 1926. The property was sold in 1957.

The property at Ste-Catherine and Peel (Saint-Antoine Ward, lot 1477) was purchased by the Bagg Estate in 1879. At the time there were three, three-storey stone-front brick houses on the lot. In 1886, these buildings were converted to shops with flats above. They were demolished in 1911 and construction began on the current building, at a cost of $60,000. The Stanley Bagg Corp. sold the property in 1951. 

Sources

  1. “Mr. Moses Davis Died Suddenly Last Night”, The Montreal Star, April 17, 1907, p. 6. Newspapers.com, accessed Oct. 28, 2025.
  2. Leslie Quilliam and Victor Neale, “James Kewley Ward”, Kelly Dollin, editor, New Manx Worthies, Manx Heritage Foundation/Culture Vannin, 2006, iMuseum, https://imuseum.im/search/collections/people/mnh-agent-94625.html, accessed Oct. 27, 2025.
  3. “Huntley Ward Davis”, Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada, 1800-1950, Robert G. Hill, editor, http://dictionaryofarchitectsincanada.org/node/825, accessed Oct. 27, 2025.
  4. Social and Personal, The Gazette, Oct. 27, 1910, p. 2. Newspapers.com, accessed Oct. 27, 2025.
  5. Huntly Ward Davis, Obituary, The Gazette, Oct. 15, 1952, p. 14, Newspapers.com, accessed Oct. 27, 2025.
  6. Norton A. Fellowes, “The Late Huntley Ward Davis, Montreal Architect,” Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, Nov. 13, 1952.

This article is also posted on the collaborative blog Genealogy Ensemble, https://genealogyensemble.com