Wilmot Deloui Matthews

Wilmot Deloui Matthews (22 June 1850 – 24 May 1919) was a Canadian businessman and owner of W. D. Matthews and Company. He also served as a director of Dominion Bank, Hamilton Steel and Iron Company Limited, Canadian Pacific Railway, Canadian General Electric Company Limited and was president of the Toronto Board of Trade.

His paternal grandfather, Abner Matthews was a native of New Hampshire, settled in Burford before 1801 and was ordained as a Methodist Episcopal minister in 1820. Wheeler Matthews built up a business there as a miller and grain and produce dealer. In 1856, he and his family moved to Toronto, under the name W. D. Matthews and Company. Eventually known as the “barley king” of southwestern Ontario, he recognized the preference of American breweries for Canadian barley and engaged in cross-border trade, setting up regional bases in Le Roy and Attica, New York.

Wilmot Matthews was born in the Burford Township in Upper Canada. After being educated at Toronto Normal School, Matthews entered his father’s business as a clerk in 1867. He married Annie Jane Love on 29 August 1872 in Toronto, and they had two sons and two daughters. In 1873, he became a partner.

In the early 1880s his reputation in the grain trade was substantial enough that he was made president of the Toronto Corn Exchange Association, which he represented in 1883 before a parliamentary standing committee on the bill to form a court of railway commissioners in Canada. The deaths of Matthews' father in 1888 and his mother two years later left him in control of W. D. Matthews and Company. In 1895 he formed a malt dealership with Lionel Herbert Clarke (L. H. Clarke and Company); five years later the two would also set up the Canada Malting Company Limited. In addition, by 1898 Matthews was a director of the Empire Produce Company and chairman of the government’s eastern board for grain standards.

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