Mackenzie House
In 1849 William Mackenzie was born in a log shanty near the Portage Road, being the ninth child of two poor tenants, Mary and John Mackenzie. After briefly teaching school and operating the Shoofly Store in Kirkfield, Willliam and his brother Alex started a construction business. Between 1874 and 1876, these brothers built bridges for the Victoria Railway and the Kinmount station. William earned a reputation as an excellent contractor, securing many more jobs as he became one of Canada’s best known and wealthiest railway builders. By the mid 1880s, he had earned more than $1,000,000, in an era when 12 cents could buy a dozen eggs or a pound of butter.
In 1888, William Mackenzie commissioned a three-storey mansion on Nelson Street in Kirkfield (now Portage Road) at a cost of $18,000—which was four to five times the cost of more common brick homes of that era. For a gentleman who associated with some of the most prominent businessmen in Canada, he needed to be able to accommodate and impress his guests. Though they were close geographically, this mansion was a world apart from the log shanty where he was born. On the main floor, visitors could chat in the parlour, dining and reception rooms. After walking up a beautiful oak staircase, they could stay in one of fifteen rooms. The house even had a bathroom and was heated with a forced air furnace. Many families in the Kirkfield area would not have indoor plumbing or a furnace until after the Second World War.
William and Margaret Mackenzie would find a way to fit into the Canadian elite—but in the process, they made themselves conspicuous in Kirkfield. Margaret learned deportment and developed an appropriate accent as her husband was also refining his manners—no longer could he be the poor son of tenants. They became art collectors. He purchased one of the first automobiles in the region and his family soon developed a reputation for their outrageously fast driving—in a community where farmers would worry about the new machines startling their horses. A crowd might gather to see the family yacht, Wawinet, and its famous passengers. Margaret employed a floriculturalist from Scotland to beautify the Kirkfield home, as she had more than 600 maples and elms planted along Kirkfield streets.
In 1889, William and Margaret Mackenzie acquired a two-and-a-half storey brick Toronto home on Sherborne Street, south of Bloor—alongside many prominent Canadian business leaders. In 1896, Margaret bought land on Balsam Lake, which she developed with a three-hundred-foot-long mansion, that included 40 rooms, fourteen bathrooms and five fireplaces. It featured tongue and groove Douglas fir panelling from one of her husband’s British Columbia mills. She had the walls covered with French silks and would employ fifteen servants to keep the mansion operational. The next year, they purchased Benevuto, a Norman castle at the head of Avenue Road, Toronto, with contents for $100,000. This limestone mansion featured four towers. Mackenzie was knighted along with his business partner Donald Mann in 1911.
It was not clear when Mackenzie and Mann began to dream about building a transcontinental railway, but one section at a time, they started piecing together a network that spanned the country. Many of their early projects entailed finishing works that others had started. It was a very risky business, because many railways were not profitable or could only be financed with significant government subsidies. In 1914, Mackenzie persuaded Prime Minister Borden to guarantee bonds totalling $45,000,000 for the Canadian Northern Railway. Huge sums were expended building a tunnel through Mount Royal (Montreal) and the mountains from Edmonton to the Pacific Coast.
The solvency of the scheme was already being questioned, but when Sir William Mackenzie heard that Great Britain had declared war on Germany on August 4, 1914, he turned ashen, remarking “I’m finished.” The Canadian Northern Railway tended to serve smaller communities than the Canadian Pacific Railway and its debts grew so large that it was threatening the solvency of the Bank of Commerce. Lady Mackenzie passed away as this national crisis unfolded, which ended with the Canadian Northern Railway being nationalized along with the Grand Trunk into the Canadian National Railways. After collapsing with an apparent heart attack while playing golf, Sir William died on December 5, 1923. Though his most famous venture had met an unfortunate and spectacular end, his businesses had touched lives across the country: Bringing electric railways to Canadian cities and connecting communities by rail, especially on the northern prairies.
In 1927, his son Joe sold the Kirkfield home to the Sisters of St. Joseph, who operated it as a convent until the 1970s. Benvenuto was demolished within a decade of Sir William’s death. His daughter Ethel Adams lovingly maintained the summer home on Balsam Lake until the 1960s, but after she died, it was abandoned, only to be demolished in the 1980s. The Kirkfield home was briefly transformed into a museum, but by the late 1980s, local residents were wondering if it might suffer the same fate the other two residences. Joan and Paul Scott purchased the old mansion, restoring a shell that had been largely stripped of any contents of value. In 1994, they reopened it as the Sir William Mackenzie Inn, taking an interest in keeping the story of the Mackenzies alive. Today, as the memories of the inn fade into history, the Mackenzie house remains as one of the most prominent buildings in Kirkfield, reflecting the legacy of the village’s famed family.
