William Weller: The Stage-Coach King

William Weller: The Stage-Coach King
By LAWRENCE F. JONES

Lawrence Jones, centre, a resident of Cobourg for the past four years, was the winner of the Cobourg and District Historical Society’s first essay contest. Jones wrote about the life of William Weller. Ties for second were Foster Russell and Percy Climo. Russell wrote abou the life of Joseph Scriven while Climo;s essay was about James Callcut Sr. The winning essay is reprinted below.

Of all those who, in the first half of the 19th century, built the foundation for the town that became the Cobourg of today, none was a colorful, as en- terprising, as venturesome, as its first mayor: William Weller, entrepreneur, risk taker on a grand scale (for the times) and public-spirited citizen.

Weller, the son of a farmer, was born in Vermont in 1798. At Wilcox of Canton, in upstate New York, then studied law with the financial assistance of his bride's well-to-do parents. That completed, Weller and his wife followed the path being taken at the time by many Americans who saw in upper Canada op- portunities for fame or fortune, or both. In the early 1820s Weller with York which became Toronto in 1834, as his base of operations, tried his hand at the buying and selling of land. His speculations were successful and gave him the funds for the first of his acquisitions -- a stage coach line. The purchase of other coach companies followed and, as well a telegraph line that extended from Toronto to Montreal and Buffalo.

Weller's coach lines served the growing communities along the St. Lawrence River and Lake-Ontario – the lakeshore often referred to as the Front- Montreal, Prescott, Kingston, Cobourg, Port Hope, Toronto, Hamilton, and places in bet- ween. He extended the service to the developing townships and villages, such as Peterborough, north of the Front. For them public transportation over land was essential; as social historian G.P. de T. Glazebrook said, contact with the Front "was essential: an isolated town can neither live nor thrive."

Thanks to Weller's enterprise, there was employment for many, skilled and unskilled, in the operation and maintenance of his business. As many as 400 were on the payroll when the Weller lines were at the peak of their prosperity. When the proprietor moved hss headquar- ters from Toronto to Cobourg in the 1840s, Cobourg enjoyed new benefits. Coaches were built in a Weller shop at George and Orange Streets and were of such high quality that one woman traveller from England described them us "not unlike the Lord Mayor's state carriage", although perhaps a. bit "showy." There was a repair shop on Swayne Street and near- by, east of the Globe Hotel (the site a century later of the Park cinema theatre) stood the ticket office.

William Weller was not only an executive --he could do what he expected his employees to do. He demonstrated this when Governor General C. Poulett Thompson (later Lord Sydenham), wanted to be taken from Toronto to Montreal in February 1849. That was not Unusual --what was unusual was that His Excellency wanted to be in Montreal in 38 hours in or- der to reprieve a convicted felon from the gallows, and the jour- ney normally took 4 1/2 days. Weller said it would be done--if he drove himself. A friend wagered £l,OOO that he could not do it in time, and Weller took the bet. Thirty-five hours and 40 minutes from the time the Vice- Regal sleigh left Toronto it arrived in Montreal, the driver exhausted but happy. Happy, too was His Excellency, who paid Weller £100 for his far and as a bonus, an engraved gold watch. On his return to Upper Canada. Weller of course picked up the £l,000 wager.

By the beginning of the 1850s, there were signs of economic trouble for the stage coach king. Contracts his lines had for the carriage of mail were cancelled in 1853 and the loss of this business was added to the growing threat from the steady advance of the Grand Trunk Railway across Upper Canada. As one author put it, "no sooner was the whistle of the locomotive heard in the land than stage coaches became things of the past." If be could not beat the railways, Weller decided he might as well join them. Through the years he had acquired much property in Cobourg and this he mortgaged heavily to obtain funds for in- vestment in a company, largely of Cobourg business and professional men, which plan- ned a railway to connect Cobourg, with Peterborough. The railway was built, with a bridge of uncertain stability to carry the tracks across Rice Lake. It was a glorious. exhilarating time. So carried away was Weller with the op- timism and enthusiasm of the occasion that he declared, at the celebration of the inaugural trip on the line: "I am rejoiced to see old things passing away and conditions becoming weller." But conditions did not become "weller". The railway failed and the stockholders lost their investments. His stage coach business dwindling to zero, much of his Cobourg land gone, Weller lost the vitality that always inspired him. Three years after the railway fiasco, he died after three weeks illness, at the age of 65. He was, one historian reported, "a poor man."

But, rich or poor, William Weller was long remembered by the people of' Cobourg. They elected him nine times to the Board of Police, Cobourg's first governing body, and, when the village became a town in 1850, their first mayor. He was a councillor for four years and mayor three times, including the year of his death,1863.

Business was suspended for his funeral and the citizens of Cobourg genuinely mourned the loss of an outstanding figure.

The Cobourg Sentinel sum- med up well the public feeling: "..one of our oldest and most in- fluential citizens, a thorough businessman (who) served this town...with honor to himself and credit to the town."

Sources of Information
Cobourg, 1978-1948-E. C. Guillet
Cobourg: Early Days and Modern Times (1981)
Victorian Cobourg: A 19th Century Profile (1976) J Petryshvn editor,
Homesteads (1979) - McBurney and Byers.
Historical Atlas of Northumberland and Durham Counties (1878)
Port Hope Historical Sketches (1901) - W. Arnot Craick
Life in Ontario: A Social History (1968) -G. P. deT. Glazcbrook
Pioneer Travel in Upper Canada ( 1933) -E.C. Guillet
The Story of Canadian Road (1967) - Guillet
Perspectives on Landscape and Settlement in Nineteenth Century Ontario (1975) J. David Wood, editor.
Toronto of Old (1873), abridged edition 1966) - Henry Scadding
Oakville and the Sixteen (1953) - Hazel C. Matthews
Tercentary History of Canada. Vol. 3 (1908) - Frank Basil Tracy
Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature (1967) Nora Story .
Cobourg Sentinel, issue of September 26,1863.
NOTE - Not all of the above provides information that was in- cluded in the essay as written, because of the limitation on length to l ,000 words maximum.