Pearson, Benjamin Franklin

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Gregory P. Marchildon, “PEARSON, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 14, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/pearson_benjamin_franklin_14E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Lawyer, promoter, financier, and politician; b. 4 April 1855 in Masstown, N.S., son of Frederick M. Pearson and Eliza Crowe; m. 31 Dec. 1876 Julia Reading in Truro, N.S., and they had one son and three daughters, one of whom married financier Fleming Blanchard McCurdy; d. 31 Jan. 1912 in Halifax.
    • Benjamin Pearson came from a proudly loyalist family. His great-grandfather, a plantation owner in South Carolina and an officer in the British provincials during the American revolution, moved with his family to Nova Scotia in 1784 and settled eventually in Truro, a township he would represent in the House of Assembly from 1806 to 1818. Frederick M. Pearson was first a merchant and small shipbuilder in Masstown, on the north shore of Cobequid Bay. With the decline in wooden shipbuilding, he moved his wholesaling business to Truro. He became the Liberal mp for Colchester in 1870, the same year he sent his son Benjamin to Pictou Academy.
    • Although possessing only average intellectual abilities, Benjamin worked hard and succeeded in entering Dalhousie College, Halifax, in 1872. After his first year, however, he was forced to return to Truro to help his ailing father’s business. With his father’s death in 1874 and his own marriage two years later, his stay was prolonged. Unable to study law at Dalhousie because of family responsibilities, he decided to proceed by articling. On being admitted a barrister in 1881, Pearson gave vent to his larger ambitions, moved to Halifax, and became a junior with Otto Schwartz Weeks, a former attorney general of Nova Scotia. By 1884 Pearson had joined the partnership of MacCoy, Pearson, Morrison, and Forbes. Eight years later he became the senior partner in Pearson, Forbes, and Covert. He had already established himself more as a company promoter than as a lawyer. None the less, his legal career would be recognized: in 1904 he was made a kc, and in 1908 he was elected president of the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society.
    • In this capacity, he hired a firm from Boston to build a new gasification plant, and through it met two of the most important contacts in his life: Frederick Stark Pearson (no relation), one of America’s leading electrical engineers, and Henry Melville Whitney, a steamship magnate and a real estate speculator and promoter who was converting Boston’s many horse-drawn tramways into a single electrified system. Through F. S. Pearson and Whitney, Pearson became convinced of the merits of electricity, which was just then beginning to revolutionize lighting and mass transportation systems in North American cities.
    • One of the earliest Canadian examples of high-risk finance, Dominion Coal’s flotation of securities with a par value of $18 million involved an enormous issue of common stock to B. F. Pearson and his syndicate, who then passed on a portion to brokers and investors to help lubricate the sale of the bonds and preferred shares. Unrelenting in advancing the economic development of Nova Scotia, B. F. Pearson had helped transform its industrial and urban landscape. In the wider sphere, though not a major capitalist, he had been a key promoter of utility and rail interests in the Caribbean and, in Canada’s maturing capital market, a pioneer in numerous and varied industrial flotations. His funeral cortège, to All Saints’ Anglican Cathedral, was one of the largest ever seen in Halifax.
  • Great Grandson of Proven Loyalist in Loyalist Directory –https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=6477
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/201634980/benjamin-franklin-pearson