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| Important People |
Explorers
& Prospectors Discovery of
Coal
& Formation of
the Coal
Company & Railroad Coal
Company Investors |
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Henry Pellatt
Henry Pellatt earned the nickname "Pellatt the Plunger" for his tendency to invest heedlessly in fledgling companies. He "plunged in" again when the Crow’s Nest Pass Coal Company issued its first shares. He was appointed Second Vice-President of the Coal Company Born in Sudbury, Ontario in 1859, Pellatt joined his father’s stock brokerage firm as soon as he was old enough. He and a group of investors were responsible for bringing electricity to Toronto. He then became President of the Toronto Electric Light Company. By 1900 he had amassed a fortune of $17 million. Henry Pellatt was knighted in 1905 by King George after organizing the Electric Development Company of Ontario and building the first Canadian Generating Station at Niagara Falls. In 1909 he sold his Crow’s Nest Pass Coal Company shares to James J. Hill, President of the Great Northern Railway. Hill already held forty percent of the Coal Company’s shares, and now became its controlling investor. Henry Pellatt had a life long dream of creating a medieval castle on a hill overlooking Toronto. He began construction on the mansion he named the Casa Loma in 1911 spending $3.5 million (1911 dollars) and employing up three hundred men. Three years later this European castle was complete with electric power, a central vacuuming system and 59 telephones. Unfortunately, after living in the mansion for only nine years Sir Henry’s fortune had been depleted and he was forced to sign ownership of the mansion over to the city of Toronto in payment of his 1924 taxes.
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Robert
Jaffray 
Tom
Uphill
