Westmount Overlooked

This house is a bit of a puzzle. It is in the correct location for 25 Melbourne Ave.; however, the civic number is on Melville Avenue. Assuming it is the original house – it appears to be the correct age – the history is as follows:

Former home (1900s) of A. E. Gagnon, manager W. W. Ogilvie.

From Canadian Industrialists:

“Due to their westerly expansion, the Ogilvie mills became involved in the developing grain trade of western Canada and they built many grain elevators along Canadian Pacific Railway lines in Manitoba. At the time, because the Canadian Pacific Railway wanted to generate traffic for themselves, they offered incentives to build grain elevators along their railway lines that could not be passed upon by the Ogilvies. The result was a pseudo monopoly in grain purchasing because the CPR would not load grain directly from farmers or non-mechanical warehouses where there was a steam powered elevator present, such as those of the Ogilvie’s.

By the end of the 1800s, A.W. Ogilvie and Company was the largest miller in the dominion and had garnered a worldly reputation for producing flour of the finest quality. After the death of William Watson in 1900, a Canadian syndicate bought A.W. Ogilvie and Company and renamed it Ogilvie Flour Mills Company. The aggrandizement continued through mill building and acquisitions then, in 1968, John Labbatt Ltd. purchased the outstanding shares of Ogilvie. Subsequently, Archer Daniels-Midland Co. bought Ogilvie from John Labbatt Ltd. in 1993”.