Did you ever stop to think about the origin of the name Dollarton that is so pervasive along the southern shores of the Burrard Inlet before it becomes the Indian Arm? There is the Dollarton Highway that extends the entire length of the road from the 2nd Narrows Bridge almost to Deep Cove. And there is Dollar Road, Dollarton Village and Dollarton Plaza too. Its naming has nothing to do with the currency and everything to do with the Scottish-born Robert Dollar, who left his birth country at the age of 14 for the promise of a better life on the other side of the Atlantic and actually found it! But we’re getting ahead of ourselves!
Photo from Memoirs of Robert Dollar, Inventory #664, Courtesy of MONOVA/North Vancouver Archives
Let’s start at the beginning - Robert Dollar was born in 1844 in the town of Falkirk, Scotland. Situated at the nexus of the country’s so-called ‘Central Belt’ that girdles the two major cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, it occupies a choke point between the Union and Forth & Clyde Canals.
Falkirk’s 21st-century claim to fame is as the home of the world’s tallest equine sculpture, the colossal ‘Kelpies’, named for the eponymous local mythological spirits but in reality a paean to the role of the horse as the pre-eminent pre-industrial beast of burden, and the proximal Falkirk Wheel, again in its distinction as the world’s first, and to date only, rotating boat-lift. It is fitting that both the former, completed in 2014 in time for the 170th anniversary of Dollar’s birth, and the latter in 2002 for the 70th anniversary of his death, pay tribute to a legacy of industry that would in due course chart his own, ever by the water, from the Forth and Clyde Rivers, to right here on the Burrard Inlet.
Dollar’s father, a timber yard manager of a sawmill, became a hard-drinking man, owing to the death of Robert’s mother in 1853, which brought about, in Robert Dollar’s unfettered words, ‘the necessity of our emigrating to Canada', landing in the New Edinburgh neighbourhood of Ottawa in 1858, with his father, step-mother and siblings. At the young age of 14, he found work initially as a cook’s helper in a logging camp, and then as a cooper/staves-maker for 12 hours-a-day, at $6-a-month. His time in what was then the recently re-united provinces of ‘the Canadas' was far from plain sailing, slumming it in the camps known evocatively as ‘shanties’, where food was scarce and disease an ever-present reality, for what sustenance there was had not nutrients enough to sustain a balanced diet. Save for potatoes, few and far between, ‘no other vegetables of any kind were used’, and several of the men would see themselves afflicted with the scourge of 'night blindness’, a malady abated by the simple consumption of dairy.
By 1861, he had a more substantial job with a logging company, moving the logs from where they were harvested down the river to the mill; trips which could take up to 3 months. This remote work evidently made a big impression on Dollar as he makes frequent reference throughout his memoirs to having reached or returned to ‘civilization’ as a frame of reference to juxtapose life outside the camp. In his own words, ‘the Civil War had been going on in the United States, and as we were six months without any mail we could not keep posted on affairs of the outside world. What information we did get was only a short account of some great engagement. We were a world to ourselves’.
In 1866, at the age of 22, Dollar progressed up the ranks in the lumber industry, to become a Director of the English and American Lumber Company. By 1874, on his honeymoon no less, Dollar set up his own lumber camp in Bracebridge, Ontario and then grew his British Canadian Lumber Company, buying logging rights and lumber camps in Ontario and then, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, still proudly bearing the name of his British Canadian Lumber Company. It was while in Michigan in 1882 that he made his first foray into the export market, chartering a ship and shipping a load of lumber to England.
In 1888, always with a nose for new markets, he expanded westwards from the Great Lakes all the way to the shores of the Pacific Ocean buying logging rights and lumber camps in Sonoma, California and Oregon and settling with his family in San Rafael, just north of San Francisco.
In the late 1890’s, he became frustrated with incumbent pricing for lumber and decided to once again try the export market, in order to sell his lumber into other less competitive foreign markets. This time, rather than chartering a ship, he had his first ship built (intended as a freight vessel) in San Francisco and launched the Grace Dollar (named after his only daughter) in 1898. With the lucrative Klondike Gold Rush in full swing, Dollar and his business partner, son Stanley Dollar, realized they could make more money shuttling prospectors up to the bustling Yukon and Alaska, so they added a passenger deck to the Grace Dollar and tapped into this market for a while.
The Robert Dollar Company was incorporated in San Francisco in 1903 and they both bought into, and commissioned from scratch, a fleet ranging from wooden schooners, steel freighters and eventually ocean liners under the names of the Dollar Steamship Company and the Dollar Line. Eventually his shipping empire stretched as far as China where it is said, after years of building key relationships, and a reputation as a savvy businessman, that an hours-long procession of thousands surrounded his hotel, and described as ‘a power in his own land, he was all but a god in the Orient’, and the ‘Grand Old Man of The Pacific’.
It was not until the middle of the First World War that he would leave his mark on a little British Columbia community at Roche Point, here on the North Shore. I say community, in common with many embryonic settlements at the outset on this side of the Inlet however the 100 acres on the Indian Arm purchased by Dollar in 1916 remained accessible only by boat, predating both the First and Second Narrows Bridges by decades still.
The purchase of the land by the Canadian Robert Dollar Company on November 9, 1916, was announced in The North Shore Press the next day with big excitement, as what would follow next would be the construction of a wharf and large saw mill with an investment of at least $200,000, ‘affording employment for vast numbers of industrial operatives and shipping their product by land and sea to all parts of the world’.
Another article, in the April 6, 1917 edition of the North Shore Press, described the wharf, then under construction, as ‘one of the largest of its kind on the North Shore’ and ‘of sufficient capacity to permit loading of two vessels simultaneously’. The new mill, ‘of immense proportions’ was also being constructed and outfitted with machinery at that time. Operational shortly after that, the mill went from concept to reality in less than one year!
Superintendent and foremen, Robert Dollar Mill, 29 August 1918, Inventory #3324. Courtesy of MONOVA/North Vancouver Archives.
Panorama of Robert Dollar Co. Ltd. Mill employees, 1934, Inventory # 13341, Courtesy of MONOVA/North Vancouver Archives.
Given the initial inaccessibility of the mill by land, Robert Dollar worked hard to create a community, developing a company town around the mill. He provided homes for his key personnel and their families and bunkhouses for the men who worked in the mill which included Indigenous, Chinese, Japanese and Sikhs. He also provided other key community buildings including a post office, store, church, and school. According to a July 27, 1917 article in the North Shore Press, the Robert Dollar Company offered the school board a school site on the company’s property, and 24 children were ready to start school in the fall term of that year. This community quickly became known as Dollarton, replacing Roche Point as a place name.
The company’s bungalows, Robert Dollar Mill, August 28, 1918, Inventory #3330, Courtesy of MONOVA/North Vancouver Archives
The company even financed the $40,000 construction of a water-system extending all the way from the Seymour River to the Robert Dollar mill at Roche Point. It was lauded by the District as ‘a decided factor in increasing settlement and providing inducements for industries along the North Arm waterfront’. The North Vancouver District offered the contractor incentive bonuses of $50-a-day should work complete 14 or more days ahead of the 8-week schedule! (Source: The North Shore Press, May 31, 1918)
With the mill up and running by 1917, and taking advantage of vertical integration with his shipping company, the Robert Dollar enterprise traded far and wide to all corners of the British Empire and beyond from South Africa to India, England to Hong Kong and Singapore, Manila to Vladivostok, and Seattle to New York and Shanghai. A consignment from Lynn Valley was said to be the ‘first concern on the North Shore to make a shipment via the Panama Canal’, bound on a Robert Dollar vessel to Boston.
Ships Awaiting Cargo At Robert Dollar Mill, Four master and steam powered vessels awaiting cargoes at Robert Dollar Mill, Dollarton, B.C, 1923, Inventory #3764, Courtesy of MONOVA/North Vancouver Archives.
Robert Dollar even saw himself featured on the cover of Time Magazine, as the ‘oldest and richest shipowner on the Pacific Coast’.
Robert Dollar on Cover of TIME magazine, March 19, 1928, Public Domain
Time cover stars notwithstanding, perhaps I relate to the man somehow, my own family like Dollar's having followed so many others to Canada from Scotland, having operated a saw mill in the rural village of ‘Hollybush', no relation to our own Hollyburn despite the latter’s etymology courtesy of John Lawson from the Scottish word ‘burn’, meaning stream. Regrettably, by the time my family made it to the British Columbian logging industry out in the Comox Valley as lumberjacks, the Robert Dollar Lumber Mill in North Vancouver had shut up shop (1942), amidst the mire of the Second World War. All that remains of this bustling enterprise are the foundations of the waste-burner and the office for the mill (also served as post office and general store). I encourage you to take a trip to Whey-Ah-Wichen/Cates’ Northerly annex Little Cates Park to see these historical structures for yourself.
Robert Dollar Mill and beehive burner, Dollarton, 1927, Inventory #5609, Courtesy of MONOVA/North Vancouver Archives
Foundation of the Beehive Burner. April, 2025
The Robert Dollar Mill Office, 1918, Inventory #3329. Photo courtesy of MONOVA/Archives of North Vancouver
Side View of the house at 518 Beachview (corner of Beachview Drive and Dollar Road), which was the Dollar Mill Office, April 2025
The front of the old Dollar Mill Office (now a house) at 518 Beachview Drive, April 2025.
Robert Dollar himself bowed out in 1932, a decade before the mill shut down, at the age of 88 in his Bay Area home, where the name Falkirk lived on in his estate-turned-cultural centre. Luckily for us, he kept a diary from the late 1860s right up to the then-present day when he authored his memoirs against the backdrop of the Great War. It is fitting that his last words on the matter were ‘The keynote until we win the war is, Ship, More Ships! And as soon as the war is over it will be: Foreign Trade, and still More Foreign Trade!’
Robert Dollar Obituary, June 3, 1932, The North Shore Press, Courtesy of Newspapers.com
Here on the North Shore, his legacy lives on in the namesake Dollar Road, and everything connected to the community he helped foster, known thereafter and to posterity, as Dollarton, including the Dollarton Highway that stretches far beyond the confines of the neighbourhood itself. In fact, in company documents dated to its contemporary operations, they find themselves addressed not to the by-then incorporated District of North Vancouver or even North Vancouver more vaguely, but simply, and fittingly, as Dollarton, BC.
Fun Facts
Dollar, in his youth, as the sole Anglophone in an otherwise French-speaking crew, confessed he never quite mastered the written language, but by season’s end, ‘could talk the language very well’, ‘I could talk it perfectly’.
Dollar was a noted teetotaller, or ‘temperance man’, and even ascribed that ‘to this resolution I attribute the most of my success in life’.
The Robert Dollar Co. played an important role in WWI transporting materials to China, where 4 US-government commissioned ships were being built to support the war effort. The reputation of Robert Dollar with the Chinese government was so strong that they entrusted him with the $30 million dollar payment, without him being bonded!
By 1933, with Robert Dollar’s son, H.B. Dollar at the helm, the Dollar mill was running to capacity with 130 employees and with a mill capacity of 150,000 feet of lumber a day (Source: The North Shore Press, June 2, 1933)
Although Robert Dollar quit school at the age of 9, after the death of his mother, he read voraciously and he was never without a library of books to feed his mind, back in Scotland and in the logging camps of his youth. It is clear from his success in the business world, amassing a fortune of $40 million shortly before his death, that his focus on education paid him dividends in spades!
Such was Dollar’s fame that when film-maker Peter B. Kyne came to shoot his Roaring Twenties-era silent movie ‘Cappy Ricks’, the titular character was based after Dollar.
Except where indicated, text and images Copyright @ North Shore Heritage and R.A. Ross Downie. All rights reserved. Republication in whole or in part is prohibited without the written consent of the copyright holder.
References:
Robert Dollar Commemorative Association: 2013 Formation Committee
Falkirk | Scotland, Map, Royal Burgh, History, & Facts | Britannica
This North Van mill was created for cargo ships during WWI - North Shore News
A Short History of Hollyburn Mtn - Iola Knight - Hollyburn Heritage Society
The Kelpies: Ten years of the world's largest horse sculptures
100-foot-tall steel horses pay tribute to Scotland’s equine past | PBS News