H.R. Macmillan
1885-1976

Mazo de la Roche, already famous for her all-Canadian Jalna and White oaks family novels, wrote Growth of a Man in 1938. She sought permission to dedicate her new novel to her famous cousin because the story was basically a romanticized account of his youth. But he demurred.

“I think I would find it impossible to read any intimate biographical publication relating to me — if I were important enough to justify its production,” Harvey Reginald MacMillan replied. He said this the same year a leading financial publication described him as the “No. 1 industrialist and business leader of British Columbia.”

MacMillan in 1938 was chairman of the H.R. MacMillan Export Company started in 1919. It had grown from a small timber brokerage firm of only three people into several separate but integrated companies known around the world for sales in logging, lumber, plywood and door manufacturing, railway tie production, and shipping.

His early years are revealed in his cousin’s novel. Born in 1885 in a Quaker community near Newmarket, Ontario, he was two years old when his father died. Because his mother worked as a housekeeper, he was brought up on the nearby farm of his Scottish grandfather. Only 16 when he graduated from high school, he subsequently attended the Ontario Agricultural College at Guelph “because it was the cheapest education I could get.”

Recognized as a voracious reader, he played hockey and football and was editor of the college magazine. Through one of his teachers, he also earned nine cents an hour at the school’s experimental forestry plot. In 1906 he graduated with honours in biology.

Two years later, following stints with a survey party in Manitoba, a logging camp in Maine, a forestry crew in British Columbia, he graduated with a Master’s degree from Yale University. A Yale professor described him as one of the most brilliant forestry students he had ever encountered.

“H.R.,” as he was to be known, joined the forestry department of the Canadian government and, as assistant inspector of forest reserves, “set aside tracts unsuitable for farm settlement and began the development of a national parks system.” While inspecting Glacier National Park in the United States, he caught a cold that developed into tuberculosis. It took him more than two years to overcome this illness, most of his rehabilitation spent at Ste.Agathe-des-Monts, Quebec. There his mother “set up housekeeping in a small flat and ... devoted her whole time to looking after me,” he wrote to his cousin Mazo. 

Born of United Empire Loyalist stock in 1885 in Newmarket, Ontario, Harvey Reginald MacMillan became one of the largest exporters of forest-products in the world. By the time he retired as chairman of MacMillan and Bloedel Ltd., in 1951, this “emperor of wood” had generously endowed forest and fisheries research at the University of British Columbia [The Toronto Star].
Returning to the forestry department in 1911, he was hired as chief forester a year later by the British Columbia government which had enacted new forest legislation. Because of his youthful appearance “they thought they had hired the wrong fellow,” MacMillan later recalled, but within months he had a staff of foresters conducting surveys and making inventories of standing timber until World War I interrupted their work. Unable to enlist because of his earlier bout with TB, he returned to the Federal government as a special trade commissioner to seek world markets for Canadian lumber. Over an 18-month period, MacMillan visited Britain, Holland, France, South Africa, and India. This tour made him realize Canada had raw material “but sadly lacked the organization to sell it to the world.” In 1916 he joined a British Columbia lumber firm but a year later was back in government with the Imperial Munitions Board to obtain Sitka spruce — the best wood for aircraft manufacturing.

By 1919, with the backing of a British lumber importer he had met on his tour, “H.R.” decided to establish his own export lumber business with both men putting up $10,000 to launch it. He recalled later, “I had so little money and so little knowledge, and the job was so great, that I didn’t know it couldn’t be done. So I went ahead and did it.”

A year later he hired one of his former B.C. government foresters, the quiet and industrious William J. Van Dusen, and they remained a successful team for more than half a century. Convinced that only personal visits would generate sales, he and Van Dusen took turns travelling extensively.

Orders came from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and California and in 1921 he made a major sale to India. Getting lumber to these countries motivated him, by 1924, to move into the shipping business. In 1927 there were 30 ships. This prompted the Canadian Lumber man to observe in 1929 that “MacMillan would be selling to the moon, if he could get delivery.”

By the mid thirties, MacMillan represented roughly 40 percent of British Columbia’s lumber export sales — a fact that its B.C. competitors tried to change. MacMillan met the challenge, filling every contract despite some slow deliveries.“ MacMillan was obsessed with the sanctity of a contract,” an executive of Mac-Blo later recalled. 

The roots of MacMillan Bloedel Limited, Canda's largest exporters of forest-products company, can be traced to the Powell River Trading Company Limited which began in 1909. In 1959, MacMillan Bloedel merged with Powell River becoming the worlds most integrated forest-products firms. This view is of the Powell River Company, circa 1915 [C.J. Humber Collection].
“H.R.” became lumber controller for the Federal government in 1940, but red tape caused him to quit five months later. C.D. Howe then appointed him president of Wartime Merchant Shipping Ltd. in Montreal, a crown corporation that had built 200 cargo vessels by the end of 1943. He worked without salary, paid his own expenses, and even though his own company, run by Van Dusen, had expanded, he made a point of telling B.C. lumber men, “We must kill off that hangover from the last war — great profits. There can be no profits in this war to capitalists, labour, or anyone else. Instead there will be a sharing of losses.”

Returning to MacMillan Export in 1944, he expanded its ownership of timber stands by buying other companies. In 1945 he made the company public. Rapid growth continued throughout the 40s and lead to the 1951 merger with Bloedel. Five years later, at 71, he stepped down as chairman. He then became chairman of the board's powerful finance and policy committee until it was replaced by an executive committee in 1959.

Despite suffering a stroke in 1966 at age 80, H.R. continued on that committee until 1970 when he and Van Dusen retired and became honorary board members. They did not attend any further board meetings but, when it was announced in 1975 that the company was getting out of the shipping business, he wrote to a “MacBlo” executive requesting that “he would please come up (he was confined to his home by then) and explain it to me.”

When he died the next year, editorials in Canada and around the world praised his business acumen, his genius with a dollar and a piece of timber, and his dynamic entrepreneurship. His famous cousin Mazo had summed up his complexity, some years earlier, by describing him as “tender and hard, imaginative and stolid, pugnacious and yielding, lovable and cold.” His will left almost half of his estate to the H.R. MacMillan Forestry Building at the University of British Columbia. Other grants included $3 million for a city planetarium, a donation for the native peoples of northern Canada, and funding for 48 PhD Fellowships.