Canada's second prime minister started out cutting stone and building jails
Alexander Mackenzie left school at 13 when his father died, trained as a stonemason in Scotland and crossed to Canada at 19. His first Kingston wages came as a promissory note that turned out worthless. Three decades later he became the country's first Liberal prime minister, serving from 1873 to 1878.
He was born on January 28, 1822, in Logierait, Perthshire, at a spot called the Hollow of the Weeping, where families once bade farewell to prisoners led off to Gallows Hill. The third of ten boys, he apprenticed in masonry and met Helen Neil, a stonemason's daughter, in Irvine. Her family was Baptist, and he converted from Presbyterianism; that faith tied him to the temperance movement for life.
In 1842 the couple emigrated with her family. Kingston limestone was too hard for his tools, so he laboured instead, then won work on a bomb-proof arch at Fort Henry and served as foreman on the city's four Martello towers and on the Welland and Lachine canals. On the Beauharnois Canal a one-ton stone crushed a leg that never fully regained its strength. Settling in Sarnia, he became a contractor known for honesty and built courthouses and jails across southern Ontario, some still standing, and even bid unsuccessfully in 1859 to construct the Parliament buildings in Ottawa.
Politics came through George Brown, owner of The Globe, whom Mackenzie helped win a first seat in 1851. He entered the provincial assembly in 1862 and the new House of Commons in 1867, then took the Liberal leadership in mid-1873. When John A. Macdonald resigned over the Pacific Scandal months later, Mackenzie succeeded him, and he won a majority in 1874.
His government brought in the secret ballot, founded the Supreme Court of Canada and the Royal Military College, passed the Indian Act and created the District of Keewatin. The Panic of 1873 and slow railway progress weighed on it, and voters turned it out in 1878. A teetotaller with a streak for pranks, he stayed an MP until a stroke killed him on April 17, 1892.
Source: Alexander Mackenzie (politician)
