The Sydneys had a good port and coal in abundance. Whitney made the combination that has resulted in the building of the great iron works at North Sydney. Fifteen years ago the two towns together did not have much more than four thousand inhabitants. At present they have nearly five times that number, and are thriving, growing cities, shipping enormous quantities of coal, and the Dominion Iron and Steel Company at North Sydney is regularly turning out twenty thousand tons of steel a month. About three-fourths of this is steel rails, and the enormous development of Canada’s railroad extension easily calls for much more than that.
Cape Breton is no longer a negligible section of the world, dependent on its fisheries, the scanty farm produce that its stony soil yields, and its mines slovenly managed and ill-developed. It is steadily growing rich, and the workers are prosperous. Both of these conditions are directly due to the foresight and management of Henry M. Whitney.
PEGGED ON TO FORTUNE.
The Career of a Future Governor Illustrates Soundness of the Adage: “Cobbler, Stick to Thy Last.”
William L. Douglas, who stands well in the forefront of the American shoe manufacturers, alone makes more shoes every year than were manufactured in the entire country when he started to learn the business.
Mr. Douglas was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1845, and when he was five years old his father died. At seven he was apprenticed to a shoemaker, and was put to pegging shoes. Practically every operation was done by hand, though Howe’s sewing-machine was used by the more progressive manufacturers for stitching the uppers. But the rest of the work, fastening the soles included, was done by hand, and the larger factories employed only a dozen or so men.
Douglas worked at the bench from six o’clock in the morning until evening made it too dark to see where to drive his awl. At fifteen he could make a shoe, from cutting the uppers and trimmings and preparing the bottom stocks and heels to sandpapering the soles and blackening and burnishing the edges and heels. Then he began to look around for easier and more remunerative work.
The cotton mills of the State seemed to offer it, and he started in, as bobbin-boy, to learn a new trade. He remained at it only a few years, for he heard the glowing stories of how much skilled shoemakers were needed in the West. When he was nineteen he went to Colorado, and after working through a number of mining-camps he located at Denver and opened a cobbling shop.
The prices he received for his work were big, but they were nearly offset by the prices he had to pay to live, and he was forced to work sometimes sixteen hours a day. He was of slight build, and the strain began to tell on him to such an extent that he was forced to abandon the business and return East.
By 1876 machinery had begun to revolutionize the shoe business, and Massachusetts was making shoes for the whole country. Douglas had a few hundred dollars, the savings of the long days in Colorado, and he began manufacturing. He could not afford to buy all the machines necessary.