BURCHILL, GEORGE (1820-1907)

BURCHILL, GEORGE, shipbuilder and lumber company head; b. Bandon, Co. Cork, Ireland, 8 May 1820, s/o Thomas Burchill and Catherine Murphy; m. 1849, Bridget Percival, d/o John Percival and Judith (Collins) Brown; d. Nelson, 18 Jun 1907.

George Burchill came to the Miramichi with his parents in 1826. He attended school to age fourteen and then went to work in the store of Henry C. D. Carman in Chatham. His next job was at Joseph Russell's shipyard on Beaubear's Island, where he started as a clerk and progressed to bookkeeper, business manager, and finally owner, when he and John Harley bought the yard in 1850.

Between 1850 and 1857 the firm of Harley & Burchill built nine ships, all of which were sold in Britain. At the same time, they conducted lumbering operations and a sawmill and shipped lumber to overseas markets. Their partnership was dissolved in 1857, Harley acquiring the shipyard and Burchill most of the rest of the assets. The business had been a success, and with his share of the profits Burchill established himself as a general merchant at Nelson.

For a number of years a general store was the biggest part of Burchill's business. Then trade in fish was added and lumber manufacturing and shipping, which came to comprise the bulk of his firm's activity. An important acquisition was the former Robinson Crocker millsite at Nelson, which was bought in 1876 from Charles Sargeant, and on which a new mill was built that year. By this time the business was firmly established and realizing a substantial annual profit. In 1880, although his operations were modest in size in comparison with Snowball's or Muirhead's, Burchill's net worth had reached almost $100,000.

From an early age, Burchill's sons, John P. Burchill and George Burchill Jr, were participants in the business, and when George Burchill & Sons was formed in 1881 they were made minor partners. Many years of growth and increasing profitability lay ahead. At the same time, the company acquired a reputation for fair employment practices and benevolence in a harsh industry. This was most evident in their lumber camps, which provided better food and more comforts than the camps of most other firms, even though this cut into earnings.

Burchill invested in other companies, especially in those which promised to bring new utilities or services to the Miramichi, such as the Chatham Gas Light Co. He was an almshouse commissioner and a warden of St Paul's Anglican Church. His wife, Bridget Percival, died in 1903, at eighty-seven years of age. He retired the next year, at age eighty-three, and John P. Burchill became the senior partner in the firm, which was now being regarded as a model for resource-based, family-controlled enterprises in New Brunswick.

Besides John P. Burchill, there were three children in the family who lived to adulthood: Alice Burchill, the wife of the Rev. George H. Sterling; Josephine Burchill, the second wife of Charles Sargeant, and later the wife of Harry Lockwood; and George Burchill Jr, who died in 1906, at age forty-six. George Jr and his wife, Lavinia M. Tremaine, raised a talented family which included George Burchill III, a member of faculty in electrical engineering at the Nova Scotia Technical College, and Henry ("Sterling") Burchill, a member of the firm of George Burchill & Sons.