A Bodwell family story · Oxford County, Ontario · Ottawa · Vancouver · 1827–1889

Ebenezer Vining Bodwell, Member of Parliament

From an Upper Canada farm to the first Parliament of Canada, the Welland Canal, the railway to the Pacific and the young city of Vancouver

On 1 July 1867 the provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick became one country, the Dominion of Canada. When its first House of Commons met that November, one of the 181 members was a farmer's son from Dereham Township in Oxford County, Ontario, elected for the riding of South Oxford without anyone even running against him. His name was Ebenezer Vining Bodwell, and he was a Bodwell in at the very beginning of a nation.

His life ran from the backwoods of Upper Canada to the far edge of the continent. He held just about every local office a farming township could offer, ran against one of the great men of Canadian history, sat in Parliament for seven years, ran the Welland Canal, kept the government's accounts for the railway through the Rocky Mountains, and helped lead the business community of Vancouver in its first years. He died out on the prairie, at a mission station in the foothills of the Rockies, at sixty-two. Most of the family tree has never heard of him.

An Upper Canada boyhood 1827–1850s

Ebenezer was born on 30 April 1827 in Nissouri Township, Middlesex County, in what was then the British colony of Upper Canada, today's southwestern Ontario. It was still frontier country, cleared farm by farm out of the forest, and much of it settled by families who had come up from the United States. His family moved to a farm in Dereham Township, in neighbouring Oxford County. Unusually for a farm boy of his time, he went on to study at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, which had opened in 1849. He married Esther D. Crandon.

Up the ladder of local government 1850s–1863

Ebenezer climbed every rung of local politics. He was Dereham's township clerk and treasurer, then a member of its township council, then its reeve, the elected head of the township. Reeves sat together on the county council, and in 1863 they chose him as Warden of Oxford County, its senior elected officer.

That same year he took on a much bigger opponent. In 1863 he stood for South Oxford in the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada against George Brown, the founder of the Toronto Globe and leader of the Reformers, one of the most powerful political figures in the country, and soon to be one of the Fathers of Confederation. Bodwell lost. It was no disgrace.

In the first Parliament of Canada 1867–1874

Four years later, at Confederation, Brown went off to run in a different riding, and Ebenezer Bodwell was returned for South Oxford to the new House of Commons by acclamation: no one stood against him. He sat as a Liberal, in the same Reform tradition as Brown. He was acclaimed again in 1872 and won a contested election in 1874, the year the Liberals under Alexander Mackenzie swept the country. His years in the Commons were the years in which Canada bought Rupert's Land, brought in Manitoba, British Columbia and Prince Edward Island, and promised British Columbia a railway to the Pacific. That promise would shape the rest of his working life.

Running the Welland Canal 1875–1879

In 1875 he left politics for a government post: superintendent of the Welland Canal. The canal carried ships between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, around Niagara Falls. It was the vital link in the shipping route from the Atlantic to the upper Great Lakes, and in the 1870s it was being enlarged for bigger ships. As superintendent he would have answered for the whole working canal: its locks and lock-keepers, its tolls and its traffic.

The railway to the Pacific 1879–1887

In 1879 Ebenezer was appointed government accountant for the Canadian Pacific Railway in British Columbia and sent out to the Pacific coast. This was the railway Canada had promised British Columbia when it joined Confederation, and the hardest part of it lay in the mountains and canyons of British Columbia, where the government itself was paying for the work. Someone had to keep track of every dollar, and for those years that was Ebenezer Bodwell. The last spike was driven at Craigellachie in November 1885.

A founder of Vancouver's business community 1887–1889

In 1887 he moved to Vancouver. The city was barely a year old. It had been incorporated in April 1886, burned almost to the ground that June, and was rebuilt at astonishing speed, because it was to be the Pacific terminus of the new railway; the first transcontinental passenger train arrived in May 1887. That same year the town's merchants founded the Vancouver Board of Trade. Its first president was David Oppenheimer, who would soon be mayor. Its second was Ebenezer Vining Bodwell.

He did not have long to enjoy it. On 18 October 1889 he died at Morley, in what was then the North-West Territories and is now Alberta, a mission station on the railway line in the foothills west of Calgary. He was sixty-two. We do not yet know why he was there.

The family album

In 2000 our cousin Connie Scholl, of the Cody line, sent the old family website photographs of Ebenezer and two of his sons. Here they are together.

Photographs courtesy of Connie Scholl, Ellicott City, Md.From the old Bodwell family website.

Two Bodwells of 1827

Here is a coincidence worth noticing. In the spring of 1827 Ebenezer was born in Upper Canada, and that September, some five hundred miles away in New Haven, Connecticut, Lewis Bodwell was born. Both went west. Both lived through the great national quarrels of their time, Lewis in Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War, Ebenezer in the making of Confederation. One built a church on the prairie; the other helped build a country. If, as we presume, both descend from Henry, they were cousins of some degree, but we have not yet worked out how.

Ebenezer's political line did not end with him. His great-grandson, according to most accounts, is Garth Turner, the broadcaster and author who was an Ontario Member of Parliament and, briefly in 1993, federal Minister of National Revenue. More than a century apart, two Bodwell descendants sat in the House of Commons.

A Bodwell farm boy from Dereham Township lost an election to George Brown, sat in the first Parliament of Canada, ran the canal around Niagara Falls, kept the books for the railway through the Rockies and helped run the business of a brand-new city on the Pacific. He was, as one Vancouver historian put it, "splendidly named." He deserves to be better remembered by his own family.