in 1853. When Harris retired in 1866, wholesale lumber merchant Abijah Weston and Bronson's son Erskine Henry joined the firm. In 1867 the company became known as the Bronsons and Weston Lumber Company. The company operated wholesale outlets in Albany, New York, Boston and Burlington, Vermont, acquired cutting rights to redwood forests in California and established their own bank. When the Reciprocity Treaty with the United States ended in 1866, Bronson lobbied for reinstating the treaty; he became a supporter of the Liberal Party federally and provincially. The Province of Canada treaty with the US was significant for Bronson because it "permitted Canadian planks and boards to enter that country duty-free". With William Goodhue Perley and James Skead, Bronson was also a promoter of the Upper Ottawa Steamship Company. In 1869 he founded the Ottawa Ladies' College in association with the Presbyterian Church. The college was later sold to the first President H.M Tory and Vice President M.M. MacOdrum of Carleton College in 1942. Carleton College has since become Carleton University. Bronsons and Weston Lumber Company was incorporated, 1888, under c. 103, and its name was changed to "Bronson Company", 1899, c. 96. Bronson died at Ottawa in 1889. Erskine Henry continued to manage the company until 1899 when it became a holding company, the Bronson Company. "Erskine Henry Bronson and Walter Goodman Bronson carried on the family business after the death of their father in 1899, followed by Frederick Erskine Bronson after the death of Walter Goodman Bronson in 1932. In the sixties, Frederic Bronson donated a large portion of the Bronson Company's land holdings to the National Capital Commission. A few years later, the National Capital Commission expropriated the rest of the company." Bronson had transformed the falls into an industrial site, and helped to convert a "backwoods village into a prosperous city". See also Lumber industry on the Ottawa River References External links Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online A Cyclopæedia of Canadian biography : being chiefly men of the time ..., GM Rose (1886) http://arc.library.carleton.ca/collections/browse/ottawa_ladies_college 1817 births 1889 deaths Canadian businesspeople American emigrants to pre-Confederation Ontario Businesspeople in timber Immigrants to the Province of Canada