RANKIN, ALEXANDER (1788-1852)

RANKIN, ALEXANDER, lumber company head, JP, and MLA; b. Mearns parish, Renfrewshire, Scotland, 31 Dec 1788, s/o James Rankin and Helen Ferguson; unmarried; d. Liverpool, England, 3 Apr 1852.

After obtaining a public school education at the Mearns parish school, Alexander Rankin, who was related to the Pollok family, took a position as a clerk with Pollok, Gilmour & Co. of Glasgow. This firm traded in timber and other products in the Baltics, and in 1812, when the partners wished to extend the sphere of their operations to British North America, they sent James Gilmour and Alexander Rankin to the Miramichi to establish a branch. When the two young men arrived in the firm's brig Mary the river was full of ice, and they had to walk a distance to reach Chatham. They began at once to clear land at the site of Douglastown and erected a sawmill, offices, and a house. Later they built a shipyard and opened a general store.

Gilmour, Rankin & Co., which they founded, was soon a major employer and supplier of imported merchandise. By 1820 it was at the center of a flourishing little 'company town' and was responsible for the bulk of the large volume of trade which was being conducted through the port of Miramichi. The first serious competition came in 1820, when Joseph Cunard & Co. started a parallel business at Chatham on an ambitious scale. The partners withstood Cunard's entry, however, as well as the Miramichi Fire of 7 October 1825, in which not more than a third of their losses of £15,000 were covered by insurance. With assistance from the parent firm their recovery was rapid, and their financial health was asserted by the construction of a huge stone sawmill at Millbank in 1829. Built, and also conducted for a time by John Petrie, this mill was employing 170 men in 1831 and was thought to be the largest such establishment in the province. In 1845 the firm had 92,000 acres in mill reserves on the North West Miramichi, Barnaby, and Little Tracadie rivers, and on Burnt Land Brook in York Co.

From the start, Rankin was the "acting spirit" of Gilmour, Rankin & Co. Although he was a partner for thirty years, Gilmour was never much involved in the day-to-day conduct of the business. Rankin was also a partner in Ferguson, Rankin & Co., which was formed at Bathurst in 1832, and in Arthur Ritchie & Co., which was in business in Dalhousie and Campbellton.

Rankin was appointed a justice of the peace in 1819. In the election of 1827 he was successful in winning one of the two Northumberland County seats in the provincial House of Assembly. He retained this for the rest of his life, weathering the political turmoil of the 1840s better than any other Miramichi politician. In 1839 he declined a call to the Legislative Council of the province but in 1847 was sworn as a member of the Executive Council. The Fredericton newspaper Head Quarters stated in 1846 that his addresses in the Assembly were "always short and to the point and delivered without the slightest effort at oratory." His influence in the house was "very great," observed the paper, but always "sparingly applied."

Rankin played his part and more in the conduct of local affairs. In the wake of the Miramichi Fire his home, which was one of only a half dozen buildings spared in Douglastown, became a haven for the homeless. On 11 October he was named chairman of the relief committee which was formed to help the victims. He was a member of the first Northumberland County agricultural society, which was formed around 1824, and treasurer of the first Miramichi chamber of commerce when it came into being in 1826. He was one of the original commissioners of the Seamen's Hospital and was on the committee of three which called for tenders for its construction in 1829.

In 1835 Rankin became the unpaid keeper of a postal way office at his Douglastown store. He was an organizer and executive officer of the branch of the Commercial Bank of New Brunswick which was opened at Newcastle in 1836. He was a founder of the Highland Society in 1841. In 1843 he was appointed an Indian commissioner for Northumberland County. In 1844 he was designated a member of the Northumberland and Gloucester Board of Health, which was set up to control the outbreak of leprosy in the Tracadie area. In 1850, as president of the Newcastle and Douglastown Mechanics' Institute, he laid the foundation stone for the hall which still stands in Newcastle. He was president of the Highland Society at the time of his death, as successor to Dr Alexander Key.

Rankin had few close friends and was often considered to be cold in his interpersonal relations. This did not prevent him from being charitable. A Micmac legend tells that the fire of 1825 was sent to punish the settlers for their mistreatment of the Indians but that it did not touch the home of a very kind man named Rankin. He frequently gave money to the churches, Catholic as well as Protestant, and was a particularly liberal supporter of his own church, St James Presbyterian, of which he was also a trustee, and chairman for some time of the board of trustees.

During the last decade of his life Rankin turned the management of the firm over to Richard Hutchison, who had become a partner in the late 1840s, and who succeeded him at his death in 1852, at age sixty-three. The original Rankin house had been destroyed by fire in 1837 and replaced by the Georgian-style residence recognizable to every Miramichi resident since that time. This too went to Hutchison, more than 100 years before it became the Rankin House Museum.

Rankin was arguably the most successful lumber baron in the province in the first half of the 19th century, and he was, by any measure, among the leading New Brunswickers of his day.