Powell, Walker

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Desmond Morton, “POWELL, WALKER,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 14, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/powell_walker_14E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Office holder, businessman, politician, and militia officer; b. 20 May 1828 in Waterford, Upper Canada, son of Israel Wood Powell, a merchant, and Melinda Boss; brother of Israel Wood Powell; m. first 18 April 1853 Catherine Emma Culver (d. 1855) in Woodhouse Township, Upper Canada, and they had one daughter; m. secondly 12 Oct. 1857 Mary Ursula Bowlby, and they had five children, four of whom lived to adulthood; d. 6 May 1915 in Ottawa.
    • Walker Powell was educated at the Norfolk County grammar school and at Victoria College, Cobourg, and returned home to share the family’s intense involvement in local and county life. The population of Port Dover, where they had moved, grew 50 per cent in the six years after the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854, and Powell grew with it. He had wealth and influence enough for public life. From 1847 Powell had also been an officer in the militia, becoming adjutant of the 1st Regiment of Norfolk. By 1858 he was town reeve, commissioner for the Court of Queen’s Bench, agent for two insurance companies, and head of I. W. Powell and Sons, shipping agents. His shipping and trading interests made him a moderate Reformer, and his county elected him to parliament in 1857.
    • In 1868, after confederation, his political past was forgotten: Sir George-Étienne Cartier, the new dominion’s minister of militia, promoted him to be the sole deputy adjutant general, with a salary of $2,800. Five years later, when the adjutant general, Colonel Patrick Robertson-Ross, resigned, Powell was promoted colonel and filled his place, and when a British officer, Major-General Edward Selby Smyth, was appointed in 1875 to command the militia, his Canadian subordinate was confirmed in the post and received an increase in salary to $3,200.
    • A politically astute businessman was not a bad choice. As the militia’s senior Canadian officer, Powell possessed no special knowledge of military affairs, but he had a capacious institutional memory and a reassuring Canadian presence amidst a succession of British generals with rigid opinions about discipline, efficiency, and proper channels. 
    • As an Ottawa administrator, Powell had little direct influence on militia policy, but politicians on both sides of the House of Commons trusted him. In 1874 he persuaded Alexander Mackenzie*’s Liberal government to adopt Kingston, Ont., as the site for a new military college, though it was in Sir John A. Macdonald’s riding, and he supported making the institution more like a Canadian university and less like its American exemplar, the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.
    • In the Red River expedition of 1870, and again during the 1885 campaign in the North-West Territories, when his British superior, Frederick Dobson Middleton, was absent on active service, Powell carried the huge administrative burden of maintaining a militia army in the field without expanding his tiny staff. Middleton recommended Powell for a cmg, but awards of honours were scrapped when Sir Adolphe-Philippe Caron, the minister of militia, recognized that no list would satisfy all who expected recognition. Powell’s only reward was to be sent on an official mission to Hawaii in 1887.
  • Grandson of Proven Loyalist in Loyalist Directory –https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=6556
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/199404490/walker-powell