He was a Toronto industrialist … until they sent him to the sanatorium

This is my great-grandfather, Robert Kilgour — a handsome dude! It’s a haunting, melancholic portrait, a black-and-white photograph colourized by hand I believe. His beard and countenance resemble Sigmund Freud, who lived during roughly the same era in a different part of the world.

Robert was a second-generation Canadian, born in 1848 in Beauharnois, Quebec, on Montreal’s south shore, the son of 1829, first-generation Scottish immigrants, William Kilgour and Ann Wilson. As a young, single man, Robert moved to Toronto in 1868 with his sister Maggie and her husband, working for them as a bookkeeper, then his younger brother Joseph joined him in 1870. By 1876, Robert and Joseph had registered a company named ”Kilgour Brothers Paper Manufacturing”, which became their major life’s work.

Together, they capitalized on a late 19th century packaging innovation — the flat-bottom paper bag! — and built a multi-storey factory to mass-produce bags and cardboard at 21 Wellington Street West, now the financial heart of downtown Toronto. They prospered, and expanded their premises to 23 Wellington, later in the century.

Robert brought Clara Govan of Glasgow (eight years his junior) to Quebec, married her in Beauharnois in 1886 (where much of his family still lived), and they raised three sons together in Toronto. Their youngest son, Arthur, died in 1917 when the plane he was piloting crashed during a training exercise in the UK. Their eldest son, another Robert*, was my grandfather.

Adversity struck Robert and Joseph in 1904, when the Great Toronto fire burned through the city’s downtown core on the evening of April 19. But the Kilgour brothers had the foresight to install towers on the roof of 21-23 Wellington (see background of this photo), which provided water to protect the building and halt the blaze before it reached Yonge Street. Nearly 100 buildings were destroyed in the calamity, decimating the downtown, but not a single life was lost. The post-fire photos resemble scenes from WWI, ten years later.

Despite his business success, personal adversity also stalked Robert, who suffered from mental illness throughout his adult life. Clara eventually sent him away to the Homewood Sanatorium of Guelph sometime in the first or second decade of the 20th century — perhaps in his late 50s.

Family lore is that Clara declared her husband Robert “dead to me” as he was taken away by car. And she didn’t see him again, never making the 50-mile trip to visit him in Guelph, an aunt of mine reported. He was effectively banished from the family and died at the Guelph institution in 1918 at the age of 71. How did he die, was there a funeral? I’m not sure, but he was buried in the churchyard of St. Edward‘s Presbyterian Church in Beauharnois, and his wife Clara joined him there ten years later upon her death.

I think of Robert Kilgour when I pass today’s Homewood institution, and try to imagine him there. The private institution was founded in his lifetime (1883) to treat mental illness and substance abuse, and it still plays a significant role in Guelph, with publicly-funded beds as well.

I’ve visited inside the modern-day Homewood — family members and friends have been treated inside its walls. It’s hard to know if the place brought comfort to the last decade of Robert’s life, or if it felt like a prison to him. His eyes appear distant, even ghostly. What’s he thinking about behind that vacant stare?

* My Dad’s family wasn’t very imaginative with male names, repeating Robert, or Arthur, or William for many generations. We’ve put an end to that now, but the less common “Govan” family name still lingers as a middle name. I’m not sure why that is, as Clara (Govan) is the villain of this story. But maybe it’s best not to judge what your ancestors did 100+ years ago, in another era, when mental illness likely carried an even larger stigma than it does today.

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Postscript: whither Joseph?

My great-grandfather’s younger brother and business partner Joseph carried on with the paper business after Robert was exiled to Guelph, and also got involved with corn syrup manufacturing, another new product in the early 20th century. He and his wife Alice Grand were childless, and when he died in 1925, Alice decided to gift their “Sunnybrook Farm” country home on the outskirts of town to the City of Toronto. (At the bottom of the plaque, below Joseph’s name, it says “A Great Lover of Nature.”)

That land is now Sunnybrook Park and the grounds of the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, in the Burke Brook ravine between Bayview and Leslie Streets near Eglinton Avenue. Among other things, the hospital now specializes in mood and anxiety disorders, and brain research.

There is no road traversing the ravine across the Sunnybrook property, linking the two busy north-south arteries. That was part of the deal specified by Alice when she donated the land to the city in 1928 in memory of her husband. It forever altered the urban geography of Toronto, just before the city’s post-war growth-spurt pushed its boundaries far north of Eglinton.

That’s a nice order of succession: private wealth from 19th century paper bag manufacturing transforms into public greenspace (and trees) in the middle of 21st century Toronto.