Tag: Henry Mulholland

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.

Beads in a Necklace Ready for the Printer

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Earlier this week, I got together with fellow authors Sandra McHugh and Claire Lindell to go over the (almost) final draft of Beads in a Necklace: Family Stories from Genealogy Ensemble. This collection of 49 short stories, written by myself and eight other family historians, will soon be a beautiful, 250-page hold-in-your-hands paperback book. 

Some of these stories were first published on Writing Up the Ancestors and/or our collaborative blog https://genealogyensemble.com. Genealogy Ensemble – recently named by Feedspot.com as one of the 100 top genealogy blogs – has been online since 2014. Things were going so well with it that we decided to choose some of our favourite stories and put them together for posterity. 

L to R, Janice Hamilton, Sandra McHugh, Claire Lindell

For the book, I chose Montreal-based stories, including two about merchant, tavern-keeper and canal-builder Stanley Bagg (1788-1853), one about Irish-born hardware merchant Henry Mulholland (1809-1887) and one about his daughter Jane (1847-1938), my great-grandmother who lived in her own world in a big house on the slope of Mount Royal. I also included two new stories. One explained why my family remained in Montreal throughout the difficult years of the referendums on Quebec sovereignty, and the other described how I grew up surrounded by the portraits of my ancestors. I knew very little about them, but eventually they inspired me to start researching my family’s history.

The launch of the limited edition print copy of Beads in a Necklace is scheduled for Nov. 15. We’re all super excited about sharing this achievement with friends and family members. I’ll let you know soon how to obtain a digital or print copy of the book, so check out this blog, or Genealogy Ensemble, for further details.