Chapter LV: The Beaver Insurance Company

In 1860, soon after my return to Toronto, I was asked by my old friend and former partner, Mr. Henry Rowsell, to take charge of the Beaver Mutual Fire Insurance Company, which had been organized a year or two before by W. H. Smith, author of a work called "Canada--Past, Present, and Future," and a Canadian Gazetteer. Of this company I became managing director, and continued to conduct it until the year 1876, when it was legislated out of existence by the Mackenzie government. I do not propose to inflict upon my readers any details respecting its operations or fortunes, except in so far as they were matters of public history. Suffice it here to say, that I assumed its charge with two hundred members or policy holders; that, up to the spring of 1876, it had issued seventy-four thousand policies, and that not a just claim remained unsatisfied. Its annual income amounted to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and its agencies numbered a hundred. That so powerful an organization should have to succumb to hostile influences, is a striking example of the ups and downs of fortune.