Harry Oakes - Early Life, Mining Career, Family

Early Life, Mining Career, Family

Oakes was born in Sangerville, Maine; his father was a prosperous lawyer. He graduated from Foxcroft Academy and then Bowdoin College in 1896 and then spent two years at the Syracuse University Medical School. However, in 1898, he left medical school before graduation and made his way to Alaska at the height of the Klondike Gold Rush in hopes of making his fortune as a prospector. For the next 15 years, he sought gold around the world, including California and Australia, before finally striking it at Kirkland Lake in Northern Ontario, Canada, in 1912. This mine is located in rocky wilderness about 600 km north of Toronto, Ontario, near the province's border with the province of Quebec. Oakes established a company, Lake Shore Mining, to develop his mine. Some 20 years later, his mine was the most productive in the Western Hemisphere, and it ultimately proved the second largest gold mine ever found in the Americas (the largest was the Homestake Mine, the basis of the Hearst fortune). By 1920, Oakes was thought to be Canada's richest individual.

Oakes married his wife Eunice, an Australian, in 1923 in Sydney, Australia; the two had met aboard a cruise ship, and she was approximately half his age when they married. Their first child, Nancy (who married Baron Ernst-Lyssardt von Hoyningen-Huene), was born in 1924, and they eventually had five children, each separated by two years.

Oakes became interested in golf and, in the late 1920s, hired top golf course architect Stanley Thompson to build a nine-hole course for him, the "Sir Harry Oakes Private Course", in Niagara Falls, Ontario.