Frederic Cumberland

Frederick William Cumberland took control of engineering for the new Ontario, Simcoe and Huron Union Railroad line north from Toronto to Allandale in 1852, and the line may never have been completed without him. An economic decision turned the route northwest from Allandale to Collingwood, bypassing Barrie, leading to charges that he had betrayed Barrie and to the famous remark that he would make grass grow in Barrie streets and pave Allandale streets with gold. In 1854 he left to resume the architectural practice he had founded earlier in Toronto, but after the railway went bankrupt in 1857 he returned as a director and in 1859 became General Manager of the reorganized Northern Railway. Under his careful supervision, rail service expanded only when timber resources along the line were depleted, since lumber was the main source of freight revenue, or when competition forced expansion. About 1863 he designed the first brick railway station at Allandale, and he also helped bring the Hamilton and North-Western Railway line to Barrie. His achievements also extended to architecture, politics, banking, the militia, other railways, and business. When he died on August 5, 1881, the Barrie Northern Advance called him one of the shrewdest, most enterprising and most successful of his class, and later that year railway employees commissioned a bronze monument by Canadian sculptor F.W. Dunbar and placed it at the Allandale rail yard in tribute to the masterful management under which the village had become the hub of an extensive railway service.

Ontario · Canada