WINSLOW, FRANCIS EDWARD (1824-1905)

WINSLOW, FRANCIS EDWARD, banker; b. Woodstock, N.B., 9 Jul 1824, s/o John Francis Winslow and Jane Caroline Rainsford; m. 1856, Constance Mary Hansard, of Kingsclear, N.B.; d. Fredericton, 20 Jun 1905.

Francis E. Winslow was a son of the first high sheriff of Carleton County, a grandson of Judge Edward Winslow, and a direct descendant of the Pilgrim father Edward Winslow, of the Plymouth colony in New England.

Winslow entered the service of the Central Bank of New Brunswick at Woodstock in 1854 and was transferred to Chatham in 1859. George Kerr had been designated agent for the Central Bank on the Miramichi in 1851, and William M. S. Evans had been cashier for several years prior to his death in 1858, at age twenty-nine. When Winslow arrived the bank's business was being conducted in the building on Wellington Street which is inscribed "Bank 1856." He worked in this building until 1866, when the branch was closed by the parent organization in Fredericton.

After winding up the affairs of the Central Bank, Winslow went to work with Thomas C. Allan, the agent and cashier of the Commercial Bank of New Brunswick at Newcastle. In November 1866 Allan retired, and Winslow was named to succeed him. In 1868, however, this branch was also closed because of the imminent failure of the corporation. This left no bank in operation on the Miramichi for the first time in thirty-two years.

Winslow departed for Saint John but was back in 1869 as the first manager of the Bank of Montreal. The directors of this bank had agreed to open a branch on condition that it would be given the government's business. At first the agency office was in Newcastle, and Winslow and his family resided there, but a second office was opened in Chatham under his supervision in 1874, and when the railway line to Chatham was completed in 1876 the main office was moved there.

Winslow was a highly successful banker, commanding a salary at the time of his retirement in 1901 which was several times that reported by most doctors, lawyers, and other professionals on the Miramichi. As a sideline he sold real estate. He was also an investor in local businesses and was an incorporator in 1888 of the Chatham Electric Light and Miramichi Telephone Exchange.

Winslow was appointed a vestryman of St Andrew's Anglican Church in Newcastle in 1871. He was subsequently a warden of St Paul's Church, and he and his wife were important figures in both the church and social life of the community.

The Chatham World characterized Winslow as "a warm-hearted, whole-souled, impulsive, generous, quick-tempered, and outspoken gentleman." He was "aristocratic in theory" but "very democratic in practice." He was "cautious and careful of the bank's money but couldn't take care of his own, giving to everybody and everything that appealed to his sympathies." After he retired, he and his wife, Constance M. Hansard, moved to London, England, but they had come back to New Brunswick and were "boarding" in Fredericton at the time of his death. They had two sons and three daughters. Their elder son, Edward P. Winslow, joined the Bank of Montreal in 1874 and was a senior executive at the time of his retirement in 1922. Their younger son, Warren C. Winslow, and their daughter, Edith Winslow, the wife of William A. Park, made their homes on the Miramichi.