C. T. Bate

Charles Thornton Bate
Mayor of Ottawa
Incumbent
Assumed office
1884
Preceded by Pierre St. Jean
Succeeded by Francis McDougal
Personal details
Born Feb 10, 1825
Cornwall, England
Died April 10, 1889
Ottawa

Charles Thornton Bate (Feb 10, 1825 – April 10, 1889) was mayor of Ottawa in 1884.[1]

He was born in Cornwall, England in 1825, the son of Henry Newell Bate and Lisette Meyer. The family emigrated to St. Catharines, Ontario in 1833. In the 1850s he founded a large wholesale grocery business, "C. T. Bate & Co.", in Ottawa, Ontario with his brother, Henry Newell Bate, who became the first head of the Ottawa Improvement Commission, later the National Capital Commission and who was knighted in 1910.

Mr. Bate was mayor when Ottawa became the first city in Canada to be completely lit by electricity, after nearly two years of debate (the move having been rejected as unnecessary by Ottawa's previous mayor Charles Mackintosh). President of the Ottawa Electric Light Company[2] and the Ottawa Gas Company, Bate served on the first board of the Bank of Ottawa, which later merged with Scotiabank.

In Ottawa, An Illustrated History, John H. Taylor wrote, "In the late nineteenth century, only the Ottawa merchandiser C.T. Bate, appears to have had any standing in the Canadian financial community".

References

  1. Dave Mullington "Chain of Office: Biographic Sketches of Ottawa's Mayors (1847-1948)" (Renfrew, Ontario: General Store Publishing House, 2005)
  2. Star Iron Tower Co 1886, pp. 366.
Preceded by
Pierre St. Jean
Mayor of Ottawa
1884
Succeeded by
Francis McDougal