first class accommodation on the S S “Baltic,” a “twin screw steamer” that sailed for Liverpool on 27 February.8 Their wedding trip would take them to London and the Continent before their return to Canada and a radical change in life-style for the new Mrs Wilson.
Twenty-two years after her mother’s death, Janet Burns would observe that her father was “a most devoted husband” and that her parents enjoyed a good relationship. It is a sentiment echoed by other close observers of the couple, but at the time of their marriage there must have been those who wondered if the match could be a durable, happy one. Cairine, after all, was quiet and introverted with an interest in reading and stimulating conversation. Her husband, although basically shy, was outgoing and gregarious with family and friends, not given to deep reflection, and, certainly not by any stretch of the imagination, intellectually inclined. Norman, however, had the best of dispositions and a strong sense of his own identity and self-worth. These qualities, plus the couple’s mutual devotion would make for a rewarding relationship and eventually allow Cairine to pursue a career of her own outside the home, something almost unheard of in the conservative, upper class circles from which she came.
The first decade or so of married life, however, epitomized the lifestyle decreed for a woman of her circumstances: raising children and acting as chatelaine of a large home. Only the setting struck an incongruous note because after her marriage to Norman, the physical contours of Cairine Wilson’s world changed dramatically. Leaving behind the enchanting city of Montreal with its busy harbour, glinting church spires and Mount Royal, she went to live in a small eastern Ontario mill town, situated some twenty miles east of Ottawa, in gently rolling country beside the Ottawa River. No longer would one of the most elegant avenues in North America—mansion-lined Sherbrooke Street—be the centre of her physical universe. For the next nine years it would be replaced by a three-storey, red-brick house and its immediate surroundings in Rockland.
When Cairine Wilson arrived in Rockland, in April 1909, it was a town of almost four thousand, the overwhelming majority of whom were French Canadians, many descendants of settlers who had left overpopulated Quebec parishes in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to work in the W. C. Edwards and Company lumber mills. In a recital of bald facts, the 1908 edition of Lovell’s Gazetteer of the Dominion of Canada reveals that the town boasted three churches, twenty stores, three hotels, one flour mill, one sash and door factory, two lumber mills, one mica factory, a bank and telegraph and express offices.
The English-speaking population numbered only three or four hundred people in the years that the Wilsons made Rockland their home. Nevertheless, this small minority held a commanding influence in the town’s affairs, occupying the top positions in the W. C. Edwards and Company and in the civic administration. A tightly knit community, they developed their own institutions—two Protestant churches, a public and a secondary school — and indulged a passion for such organized sports as hockey and curling. Curling was especially favoured by company officials, who built their own curling hall and mounted a winning team against rivals from Ottawa, Thurso, Cumberland and Buckingham.9 One of the company skips was Norman Wilson, who, after the family’s move to Ottawa, became a leading force in the Rideau Curling Club, serving as its president from 1928 until 1942.10
For her part, Cairine Wilson would have little time for recreational activities, organized or unorganized, during this period in her life. On the rare occasions when she did, she would drive the pair of Roan ponies that she had received from the Edwards for a wedding present or help the family gardener to tend the large vegetable and flower gardens on the Rockland property.
Work, of course, dominated the lives of all the townspeople in these years for most worked long hours six days a week. The largest employer was the W. C. Edwards and Company whose two lumber mills at Rockland were managed by Norman Wilson. The largest of these was built in 1875 to replace an earlier and more modest mill constructed in 1868. That was the year when W. C. Edwards, then a young man of twenty-four, embarked at Thurso, Quebec on the steamer “Caroline” of the Ottawa Forwarding Company, his former employer, and disembarked at what is now Rockland to dig and prepare the foundation for the first of many sawmills in what would become a lumbering empire. With forwarding merchant, James Wood, Edwards formed the firm of W. C. Edwards and Company and then proceeded to work side by side with his employees in all departments of the mill’s operations, from the cutting and hauling of logs to the driving of the steam engines and the shipping of the lumber. A man of great zeal and energy, who routinely worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day, Edwards built the business into a flourishing enterprise that spawned a second mill in Rockland and then expanded to Ottawa. Here, the lumber magnate acquired several industrial properties on both sides of the Rideau Falls, which he proceeded to convert into an impressive wood manufacturing complex consisting of a planing mill, a sash and door factory, and a mill for shaping hardwood lumber. When these buildings were destroyed by a spectacular fire in 1907, the Senator took the insurance money, added to it, and built one of the most modern fireproof sawmills in Canada.
The W. C. Edwards and Company, therefore, was one of the largest and most prosperous lumbering manufacturing firms in the country when Norman Wilson stepped down from Parliament in 1908 and became manager of the large mill on Edwards Street and the smaller one on Woods Street. The town that became his second home and to which he brought his bride in 1909 owed its existence and prosperity largely to these sawmills. From six in the morning to six at night, six days a week, they screeched away, relentlessly cutting Ottawa Valley lumber into lengths that were sorted and then pulled by horse-drawn trolleys on rails to vast lumberyards for storage. Most of this lumber, along with such secondary products as boards, slats and shingles, was shipped across Canada and out of the country. Some, however, was sold at nominal cost to company employees to encourage them to build their own homes. Still more wood was used in the construction of company houses that were rented for three to four dollars a month to employees. Rockland was nothing if not the quintessential company town. W. C. Edwards even served as the town’s mayor from the time of its incorporation in 1908 until the next year when he and his wife Catherine moved to Ottawa and into the large, picturesque stone house, which in 1949 would be designated the official residence of the prime minister of Canada.
The large red-brick residence with the impressive facade and circular driveway that became Cairine Wilson’s new home and that was occupied rent-free by the family belonged to Senator Edwards. Three storeys high, with a verandah that opened off the second floor and a palpable air of prosperity, it stood beside a clump of pine trees on a hill that overlooked the sprawling white mills and huge piles of drying white and red pine and spruce that stretched as far as the eye could see. Nearby on the grassy slope were the homes of other members of the Edwards’ entourage and their families — the Binks, the Murrays and the Reeces.
In keeping with the estate of a lumber king, there were stables, where Cairine could keep her pair of Roan ponies, a garage for the family’s Franklin car, and large vegetable and flower gardens. But, apart from these features and a contingent of servants, there was little to remind her of the life-style that she had left behind her in Montreal, except perhaps the visits of family members and Montreal friends. Among the first arrivals was sister Anna who visited her sister and brother-in-law in August 1909. Then that autumn Cairine’s parents came to pay their respects and find out how their daughter was faring. Brother Edward arrived in May 1910 as did a close childhood friend of Cairine’s, Mildred Forbes. Mildred would pay several visits to the Wilsons when they lived in Rockland, and when she served overseas as a nurse during the First World War Cairine would arrange for numerous food parcels to be dispatched to her.11
Family members and old Montreal friends were not the only visitors to find their way to Rockland from larger, more sophisticated urban centres. During their years in this out-of -the-way town the Wilsons also drew visitors from New York, Liverpool, Washington, D.C., Tokyo, The Hague, Glasgow, London, San Francisco, Kansas City, Chicago and Montevideo.12
No sooner had she settled into her new home than Cairine found herself pregnant. On 16 January of the following year, the first of the Wilsons’ five
