CAREW, John

John Carew built the lumber business that bore his name at Lindsay from nothing into the largest employer of labour in Victoria County, presided over the Lindsay Central Exhibition through the First World War, and represented Victoria South in the Ontario Legislature through a single term that spanned the conscription crisis and the armistice. Lindsay knew him as “Honest John.” Two of his three daughters married into the Frost family of Lindsay, and one of those marriages reached the top of Ontario politics a generation later: his daughter Gertrude married Leslie Frost in 1926, the year before Carew’s death, and Frost went on to serve as Premier of Ontario from 1949 to 1961.

Early life

Carew was born on 5 January 1862 in Emily Township, Victoria County, Ontario, a farming township north-east of Lindsay in the Kawartha Lakes region, the son of a father who also carried the name John Carew. Emily Township had been settled in the 1820s and 1830s by Irish Catholic and Irish Protestant families, and the lumber and milling economy of the area was part of the Kawartha stand of white pine that was then still being commercially logged. He was educated in Lindsay.

The John Carew Lumber Company

Carew established his lumber business at Lindsay in 1891, when he was twenty-nine. The firm dealt first in cut lumber from the Trent watershed. Over the next two decades it expanded into building supplies, sash-and-door work, and contracting, and Carew took an ownership stake in a Lindsay woollen mill, a brick-manufacturing concern, and a local steamboat company alongside the lumber operation.

In 1911 Carew took the formal titles of President and General Manager of the newly incorporated firm. By 1909, when a correspondent from the trade paper Canada Lumberman visited the Lindsay mills for a profile in Canadian Forest Industries, Carew was already established as the largest single employer of labour in Victoria County and was known across the town, in the reporter’s phrase, as “Honest John,” a self-made man who had learned the lumber trade “from the ground up.” His son Francis John (Frank) Carew, an officer who would rise to lieutenant-colonel in the Canadian Forestry Corps during the First World War, later succeeded him as managing director; Frank Carew was also a nationally competitive curler, skipping two Ontario championship rinks after serving as vice-skip under J. D. Flavelle.

Marriage and family

Carew married Margaret Kelly in 1885. They raised four children. Their son Frank followed his father into the lumber business and military service. Of their three daughters, Roberta married Cecil Frost, a Lindsay lawyer who became Mayor of Lindsay in 1936 and President of the Ontario Conservative Association in 1937, the year he managed Earl Rowe’s campaign in that year’s provincial election; Gertrude married Cecil’s older brother Leslie Frost at Lindsay on 29 May 1926, and Leslie went on to serve as Premier of Ontario from 1949 to 1961; and Annie married Stanley Beal, son of the Lindsay manufacturer Robert M. Beal. Cecil Frost died suddenly in June 1947, two years before his brother reached the premiership; Carew himself had died two decades earlier and saw neither son-in-law’s political career unfold.

Civic life at Lindsay

Carew sat on the Lindsay Board of Trade and the Lindsay Board of Education, and served as a governor of Lindsay’s Ross Memorial Hospital. From 1910 through 1915 he served as President of the Lindsay Central Exhibition, the agricultural show that drew farming exhibitors from across Victoria County.

Orange Order

Carew’s lodge affiliation was with Loyal Orange Lodge No. 557, the Lindsay-district lodge. His son would also carry a membership in the same lodge.

Ontario Legislature

Carew contested the Victoria South seat in the 1914 Ontario general election as the Conservative candidate and won, in a riding newly re-established for that election. He served through the 14th Parliament of Ontario, across the entirety of the First World War and into the post-armistice demobilisation. He did not seek re-election in 1919; Frederick George Sandy succeeded him in the riding, and Carew returned to full-time management of his lumber firm.

Death and legacy

Carew died on 19 July 1927 in Victoria County, at the age of sixty-five. The firm passed to his son Frank, who kept the Carew name on Lindsay commercial signage into the mid-20th century. Two profiles of Carew’s business career survive in print from his own lifetime and shortly after: Hector Charlesworth’s Cyclopaedia of Canadian Biography (1919) and Watson Kirkconnell’s Victoria County Centennial History (1921), both standard references for Victoria County’s commercial and civic elite of the period.