M.J.

Most Ottawa Valley towns have a Carnegie library, and almost everyone knows they’re named after Andrew Carnegie, who endowed such libraries all across North America, and even beyond. But although Pembroke, Renfrew, Arnprior, Almonte and Carleton Place all had O’Brien theatres (only Renfrew remains, I believe), few are aware of the pioneer business magnate who created them so that people could “have a little light in their lives”.

“M. J.”, as O’Brien was known, was born in Lochaber, Nova Scotia to desperately poor Irish immigrants. We don’t know much about his early schooling, but we do know that by age fourteen he was making a living carrying water for railway workers, two buckets at a time.

M.J. could have moaned and groaned about his lot in life, but he didn’t. He watched carefully and figured out how things actually worked, and by age eighteen he was subcontracting railway building work. Moving to the Ottawa Valley in 1879, he won the contract to build the famous K&P Railway, and ultimately was responsible for laying, more than any other man, more track of the various lines which ultimately became the Canadian Pacific Railway .

In 1891 he went bankrupt, but refused to roll over and die. By the year 1916 he had a personal income of $1,606,233.86. That was in 1916 dollars, before the beginning of Income Tax in Canada. You do the math.

In 1903 he had a chance to buy four Northern Ontario silver mine claims for $1000 each, which returned him $3,000,000 within a few years. Soon he also had gold mines in Nova Scotia and copper mines in Mexico.

Like many modern multimillionaires, O’Brien (and his son Ambrose) loved sports, founding the National Hockey Association, the forerunner of the NHL. At one time the O’Briens owned four of the five teams.

During WWI he created the first nitro-celluloid munitions plant in the entire British Empire, and built cargo ships to carry the munitions to Europe.

From 1918 to 1925, M.J. sat as a Canadian Senator. Not bad for a poor water boy of limited education.

As with all our famous dropouts, M. J. O’Brien never gave a second thought to not having a school-leaving certificate on his wall, but instead looked for opportunities to apply his Giftings and his instincts to move ahead.

And, like so many on our list, he understood that his good fortune was not something to be hoarded jealously, but to be shared with his fellow citizens who, each in a different way, had enabled him to go from water carrier to magnate.