Mulholland Bros. Hardware Merchants

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In 1878, two brothers from Montreal opened a hardware store in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The Prairie city, known as the “gateway to the west,” was growing rapidly, and for several years the store appears to have been profitable, however, it went bankrupt in 1889. After that, the brothers’ lives took very different paths.

Mulholland Bros. Hardware Merchants was owned by Joseph Mulholland (1840-1897) and his younger brother Henry (1850-1934). Hardware must have been an easy choice for them since their father and several of their uncles had been very successful in the hardware business.  

Joseph Mulholland, , Montreal, QC, 1865, source: William Notman, I-1757421, McCord Stewart Museum

Their father, Henry Mulholland (1809-1887), was born in Lisburn,1 near Belfast in the north of Ireland, and immigrated to Montreal as a young man. He soon found employment with a wholesale and retail hardware firm owned by Benjamin Brewster. By 1851 he was a partner in the Brewster and Mulholland hardware company. He later went into partnership with a member of the extended Workman family, Joel C. Baker. The hardware firm of Mulholland and Baker was in business from 1859 to 1879.

Henry Mulholland sr. married Ann Workman (1809-1882) in Montreal in 1834. The Workman family had also come from the Lisburn area. Four of Ann’s brothers were in the hardware business, including William Workman (1807-1878) and Thomas Workman (1813-1889),who were partners in the firm of Frothingham and Workman, reputed to be the largest wholesale hardware company in Canada. The country’s population was growing, and hardware and building materials were in great demand.  

Henry and Ann Mulholland had several children who died very young, but two daughters (Ann and Jane) and three sons (Joseph, Henry and Benjamin) lived to adulthood. Both daughters remained in Montreal. Ann married Dr. George Henry Wilkins, while Jane and her husband, banker John Murray Smith, were my great-grandparents. Son Benjamin died of tuberculosis in Toronto in 1882.

The 1870 Canadian census found Joseph, 29, and Henry, 19, living in Montreal with their parents. Joseph was identified as a merchant, probably employed by his father’s firm. According to one newspaper account, he lived in Guelph, Ontario for a time prior to going to Winnipeg.2 Henry also worked for the family-owned hardware companies at the beginning of his career. Then, in 1878, Joseph and Henry headed to Manitoba. Many families were doing the same thing, attracted by the vast expanses of prairie farmland

The city of Winnipeg, incorporated in 1873, was a service center for the surrounding grain farms and, about a decade later, it became an important stop on the newly built Canadian Pacific Railway. The first CPR train steamed into the city in 1886. Optimists envisioned Winnipeg as a future “Chicago of the North”. In 1873, the city had a population of about 1900 people; that had risen to 8000 by 1881 and 42,000 in 1901.

When Joseph and Henry opened their Winnipeg store in 1878, it faced stiff competition, and the large newspaper advertisement announcing the opening of Mulholland Bros. ran alongside ads from several other hardware stores. Over the next few years, the newcomers focused on basic items like fencing wire and wood stoves.

Source: Manitoba Free Press, p. 4, May 26, 1880, Newspapers.com

Running a business with a sibling had its challenges. In a letter to his father in 1884, Henry must have mentioned that he and Joseph did not see eye to eye on a bookkeeping entry. Henry senior replied, “Joseph is a good-hearted, generous fellow, and I trust that you and he will get on cordially together, as it will be for your natural interest to continue the business without any wrangling and refer any differences of opinion between you and him to your Uncle Thomas [Workman] and me who have had long experience in co-partnership businesses and in keeping accounts between the copartners.”3

Henry senior continued to offer sensible advice and encouragement: “I am glad to hear that you are making no bad debts and that you have no large accounts due to you in the books and that your stock is well selected and next to this never be tempted to offer any customer to increase his indebtedness by selling him more goods on credit in hope of obtaining payment of a past due debt.”

It appears that Joseph was the more outgoing sibling. His name appeared frequently in Winnipeg newspapers as he was involved with the Board of Trade. He was for a time president of the Winnipeg Liberal-Conservative Association, and he was briefly a candidate for mayor of Winnipeg, but withdrew his name. Several newspaper clippings following his death described him as a very likeable fellow. 

Meanwhile, Henry’s name never appeared in the newspapers, so perhaps he was the quiet one, busy running the store. It is also possible he was distracted by family obligations. Henry was married to Ontario-born Christina Maria Shore and the couple had six children.

Henry and Christina Mulholland with five of their six children. source: Mulholland family collection.

On June 25, 1885, Mulholland Bros. ran an ad in the Manitoba Daily Free Press listing the many new items they had in stock, including blacksmith and livery stable supplies as well as articles for barbers, butchers, hunters and gardeners. They also carried bird cages and ivory-handled table knives.

Few of Winnipeg’s citizens were wealthy, the local economy was dependent on a good grain harvest, and shipping costs to Winnipeg were high. The business may have over-extended its inventory. In February 1889, a bankruptcy sale notice for Mulholland Bros. appeared in the paper, listing egg boilers and dog collars among the many items to be disposed of.4

Joseph returned to Montreal and, in 1890, he married Amelia Bagg (1852-1943). Amelia had inherited Montreal real estate from her father, Stanley Clark Bagg, and she was an independently wealthy woman. She was generous to family members in need, and in return, she was loved and respected by members of both the Bagg and Mulholland families. For Joseph, marriage to Amelia not only brought companionship, it also brought him a job in the Bagg family business as a real estate agent.

His good fortune did not last long, however. Joseph died of heart failure brought on by extreme heat in Montreal on July 15, 1897.5

As for Henry, after the Winnipeg store failed, he remained in Manitoba for a time — the family was still there in 1891 when the census was taken — but they eventually moved to Toronto, where Henry continued to work as a hardware merchant. After his death, his youngest son, Toronto lawyer Joseph Nelson Mulholland, commented that Henry had never regained his stride following the bankruptcy.6 When Henry died in Toronto in 1934, at age 84, his obituary did not mention the Winnipeg venture.7

This article is also posted on the collaborative family history blog https://genealogyensemble.com

Thanks to my distant Mulholland cousin for contacting me and telling me about his ancestor Henry. I had no idea that Joseph he and Joseph ran a hardware store in Winnipeg.

See also:

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

Janice Hamilton,  “The Life and Times of Great-Aunt Amelia”,  Writing Up the Ancestors, June 21, 2023, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2023/06/the-life-and-times-of-great-aunt-amelia.html

Janice Hamilton, “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. “The Late Mr. Mulholland”, The Montreal Star, Feb. 19, 1887, p. 8, Newspapers.com, https://www.newspapers.com/image/740882983/?match=1&terms=Henry%20Mulholland
  • 3. Letter from Henry Mulholland sr. to Henry Mulholland jr., Dec. 8, 1884, Mulholland family collection.
  • 5. “Late J. Mulholland. a man who was cordially liked by many friends in this city”, The Winnipeg Tribune, July 10, 1897, p. 5, Newspapers.com,
  • 6. Letter from Nelson Mulholland to Fred Murray Smith, June 22, 1943, Mulholland family collection.

The Spiritualist Prime Minister: a book review

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It has been 150 years since William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874-1950), Canada’s longest serving prime minister, was born in what is now Kitchener, Ontario. The anniversary of his birth passed with little fanfare, possibly because of King’s reputation as “weird Willie.” A new book called The Spiritualist Prime Minister: Volume I, William Lyon Mackenzie King and the New Revelation, by Anton Wagner, reveals what was weird about him.

Born Dec. 17, 1874, King was the grandson of William Lyon Mackenzie (1795-1861), leader of the failed Rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada. King’s mother, Isabel, was his daughter. King grew up in Ontario with his parents and three siblings in what has been described as a happy family. He obtained several degrees from the University of Toronto and graduate degrees from Harvard University. In 1900, he was appointed Deputy Minister of Labour in Wilfred Laurier’s federal Liberal government. He was elected as a member of Parliament for the first time in 1908 and was appointed to cabinet a year later, but lost his seat in 1911 when the Liberals were defeated. He became leader of the Liberal Party in 1919, following Laurier’s death.

Over the next 21 years, he was prime minister for three stretches: 1921 to 1926, 1926 to 1930, and 1935 to 1948. During this time Canada went from having a primarily agricultural economy to becoming industrialized. King was prime minister during the difficult years of the Depression in the 1930s, and during the World War II.

Although he is said to have been a poor public speaker, King succeeded in keeping the country united through these tumultuous times. Today, many historians acknowledge him as Canada’s greatest prime minister. But King had interests and beliefs that the public did not know about. It is these activities, not his political accomplishments, that are the focus of Wagner’s book.

Raised a Presbyterian, King was a deeply religious man, but in addition to his Christian beliefs, he became a spiritualist: he was convinced of the continuity of life after death, and in the existence of a spiritual world that interacted with and guided him in the material world. Such beliefs were not uncommon at that time. Many people had lost loved ones in World War I and in the great flu epidemic of 1918, and sought to communicate with them on the other side. While it may have been acceptable for ordinary people to try to contact deceased loved ones, it was another thing for the prime minister to do so. Meanwhile, Wagner writes, King was convinced he was “an agent of God, working out His will ‘on Earth as it is in Heaven.’”

Some people have suggested that King was on the brink of insanity. Wagner speculates he may have been suffering from prolonged grief disorder. King was unmarried and had few close friends. Both his parents and two of his siblings had died by 1922, and he was undoubtedly lonely. He was particularly attached to his mother, believing that she was “pure and holy and Christ-like” and was watching over him. A large portrait of her hung in his Ottawa study, and she regularly appeared to him in dream visions. 

Around 1917, King began consulting a fortune teller, having his horoscope read and consulting phrenologists, numerologists and palm readers. He participated in a séance for the first time in 1932 with the medium Etta Wriedt, and from then on took part in dozens of seances in the United States, England and Canada. At home, he began to act as a medium himself and, along with his “spiritual companion”, the married Joan Patteson, had regular table rapping conversations with spiritual entities over “the little table.”

King also met and corresponded with my grandparents, psychical researchers Dr. T.G. Hamilton and his wife, Lillian, of Winnipeg. It was because of this connection that I was asked to review Wagner’s book.

A few people knew about these activities, but they were not public knowledge. King kept a diary in which he recorded his daily activities, including his occult beliefs and practices. He intended these diaries to become the basis of his memoirs, but he died before he got a chance to write them. After he died, the instructions he left concerning the diaries were unclear. Some of his executors wanted to burn them in order to preserve King’s reputation but, in the end, they were not destroyed. In fact, they were eventually transcribed, with some omissions, and the 30,000-page typed copy is available online from Library and Archives Canada.

One of the first historians to write about King’s inner life was C.P. Stacey. In A Very Double Life: the Private world of Mackenzie King, published in 1976, Stacey wrote that King often frequented prostitutes. This information, as well as revelations about King’s spiritualist beliefs, led to his reputation as being weird. But until Wagner’s book was published in 2024, those occult activities had not been studied in depth. Volume I is an exploration of King’s life as a spiritualist, while Volume II takes a closer look at the many mediums he interacted with.  I have not read volume II.

Wagner is not an expert on Canadian political history. He has doctorates in drama and theatre, and has produced documentary films on arts and culture. He did, however, do extensive research for this book, not only from the primary sources of King’s diaries and letters; volume I includes a 15-page bibliography.

Volume I includes several examples of how King’s occult beliefs impacted his political decisions. Early in his political career, King consulted a fortune teller before choosing an auspicious date for an election – and he was disappointed when the prediction proved wrong. In 1937, King’s belief that he was part of a divine plan to save the world from war took him to Germany, where he badly misjudged Hitler and his intentions. And at the end of the war, King asked for advice from the recently deceased Franklin Delano Roosevelt regarding a spy scandal and what he should reveal to the Soviet Union about the development of the atom bomb.

Unfortunately, interesting as the topic is, I found the text hard to follow. So many people and events were included that the contents might have benefitted from better organization and an index, although a chronology at the end of the book does help.

The Spiritualist Prime Minister, by Anton Wagner, PhD, is published by White Crow Books in association with the Survival Research Institute of Canada.

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