John Molson

Founder of a noted Canadian brewing enterprise that is now over two centuries old, John Molson was also a steamboat builder and railway financier in early nineteenth century Canada in addition to being a member of the Assembly for Lower Canada (later Quebec) in the 1820s, a member of its Legislative Council in the 1830s, and president of the powerful Bank of Montreal from 1826 to 1834. In short, he was a highly significant figure in the development of Montreal – Canada’s first real metropolitan city.

An orphan from Lincolnshire, England, John Molson (1763-1836) settled in Montreal, Quebec, in 1782. By 1786, the young entrepreneur had established a small brewery in Montreal that is today one of Canada's oldest companies and one of the most widely recognized Canadian corporate names around the world.

Aside from his personal capacities – considerable – his basic role as a brewer was important. In a still rather primitive Canadian economy, barter and unsecured, risky credit played all too large a part. Molson’s product, however, since it was purveyed for cash, enabled him to provide valuable capital for entrepreneurial ventures. When he created a new “steam” technology to pump his vats and grind his grain, brewers (who also became distillers) welcomed the industrial revolution that was extending from a manufacturing Britain to an agrarian Canada. Thus not just Molsons but Gooderhams (brewer-distillers in Toronto) and others elsewhere would take up new productive enterprises. Yet it was John Molson who was the first to seize the business initiatives that grew out of brewing.

Born in Spalding, England, in 1763, orphaned and privately schooled, John Molson came to Canada in 1782 and, four years later, used his parents’ legacy to become sole proprietor of a brewery in Montreal. It prospered, as did Montreal, with trade expanding into a fast-settling Upper Canada further west up the St. Lawrence. Molson used income from brewing to enlarge his operations: to apply steam power at his works with a new engine brought from England, and then to start a steamboat line on the St. Lawrence between Montreal and Quebec. Moreover, in 1809, he put a Montreal-built steamboat, the Accommodation, into service on his line with an engine now made at the Forges Saint-Maurice that, dating from French times, was Canada’s earliest iron foundry. The Accommodation was the first successful steamboat built entirely in North America.

His steamboat line prospered markedly during the War of 1812 by carrying British troops and munitions from the port of Quebec to assist in the conflicts against the United States that were taking place in Upper Canada. And after the war, this Molson enterprise once again prospered by transporting British immigrants and their goods up the St. Lawrence for settlement.

A highly prominent Montreal business figure, John Molson became president of the Bank of Montreal in 1826 and kept that office until two years before his death in 1836. While still the entrepreneur of new modes and projects, he put his financial weight behind Canada’s first railway, the Champlain and St. Lawrence Railroad that was built to run 16 miles from the St. Lawrence shore across from Montreal to Saint Jean, where the Richelieu River flows into Lake Champlain. This railroad thus provided a link between two great water routes: the St. Lawrence River up to the Great Lakes and the Hudson River down to New York.

Molson died early in 1836, just months before the new rail line was opened to traffic. His enterprises, however, continued. His son, John Junior, was first president of the Champlain and St. Lawrence Railroad; son William became first president of Molson’s Bank – a power for many decades – that he and his brother established in the early 1850s.

The original John Molson would endure in history for good reasons; as founder and builder of a great Canadian brewing and distilling house and as an initiator of both the steamboat and the railway age, he embodied a popular motto of the Molson companies today – “Strength through Diversity.”