Private Diary Of Robert Doller On His Recent Visits To China
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Robert Dollar was a Scottish-American ship owner and industrialist. He became a lumber baron, shipping magnate, philanthropist; he was also a Freemason.
Background
Dollar was born on March 20, 1844 at Falkirk, Scotland, the elder of two sons of William and Mary (Melville) Dollar. His father was manager for a lumber company, but the mother died when Robert was about nine or ten and the father took to drinking, which led Robert to vow that he would never touch liquor. The father married again and the stepmother was kind to the two boys, but they were very poor.
Career
At twelve Robert had to leave school and go to work in a machine shop, where he was paid about sixty cents a week. In 1858, when the boy was fourteen, his father emigrated to Canada, taking his wife and two sons. They settled at Ottawa, and there Robert began working twelve hours a day in a stave mill, receiving wages of six dollars a month. Next he became a chore boy in a wilderness lumber-camp, where he washed dishes, cut and carried firewood, tended the stables, and from the loggers learned to speak French. He even found time to do a bit of reading. At seventeen he was in another camp, wielding ax and saw by day, keeping the accounts in the evening. After five years of this, he was at twenty-two made foreman of a camp of forty men at a wage of twenty-six dollars a month. His pay gradually rose to forty dollars, and out of their earnings he and his brother bought a five-hundred-acre farm for their parents.
In 1872, at the age of twenty-eight, Dollar took a partner and went into the logging business for himself, but within a year the depression of 1873 ruined their business and left them $5, 000 in debt. The partners separated, each agreeing to pay half of the indebtedness, and Dollar went back to work for wages. In three years he had paid his debts. He then went into business again with another partner who supplied the cash, Dollar contributing the experience. This time his venture was successful. In 1882 they moved to Marquette, Michigan, where there was more large timber left than in their former location.
Finding that the United States Government still had an immense quantity of land to sell at $1. 25 an acre, Dollar bought all of it that he could find cash for, and it proved a fine investment. He disliked the cold winters in northern Michigan, and in 1888 - the year in which he became a naturalized citizen of the United States - he removed to California, though it took him some time after that to close out his Michigan interests. In California he first bought a large tract of redwood and began cutting. Finding it difficult to engage vessels when he needed them to move his lumber along the coast, he bought a small steam schooner in 1893 and thus began his maritime career. He bought other schooners, then progressed to building cargo vessels of his own.
In 1901 he made his first venture in the China and Japan trade, with a steamship of 6, 500 tons. He gradually built up a fleet and became intimately acquainted with China. He was there at the time of the fall of the Empire and the establishment of the Republic in 1911-1912, when he acted as peacemaker and urged the recognition of the Republic by the United States. He became very popular in China; its presidents consulted him, gave him decorations, and he became an influential counselor of the government. He gave $50, 000 to erect a Young Men's Christian Association building at Wuchang, not to mention other benefactions. He and his sons meanwhile became one of the greatest of ship-owning families. Dollar bitterly opposed the United States Government's merchant marine policies and its going into the shipping business during the First World War. Nevertheless, he consummated a contract in behalf of the Chinese Government by which it built four cargo ships with Chinese labor under Dollar's supervision, for the United States. All moneys were to be paid to Dollar, and the Chinese Government asked neither bond nor contract from him. These ships cost $2, 250, 000 each, and after the war the Dollars bought them from the United States for $300, 000 each. The seven big government passenger ships named after American presidents, which cost the government $29, 000, 000, were also bought by the Dollars in 1923 for $3, 850, 000. With them Dollar inaugurated the first 'round-the-world passenger service ever undertaken and made it successful. Robert Dollar was nearly eighty when he circumnavigated the globe (accompanied, as almost always, by his wife) soliciting business for this line. A total abstainer himself, he never permitted the sale of liquor on his boats, of which he and his sons came to own about forty, eighteen of them passenger ships.
Dollar was president of the Robert Dollar Steamship Company, of the Canadian Robert Dollar Company, the Admiral Oriental Company, the Dollar Portland Lumber Company, and director in other corporations and in banks.
Dollar died on May 16, 1932, in San Rafael, California.
(Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
An American railroad president said of him during his lifetime, "He has done more for our trade with the Orient than any other man alive. "
Connections
In September 1874 Dollar was married to Margaret Proudfoot of Ottawa, by whom he had three sons and one daughter: R. Stanley, J. Harold, Melville, and Grace.