Business Career in British Columbia
When McRae arrived to live in Vancouver in 1907, he came intending to involve himself in business ventures as an active investor. Even before arriving to live on the west coast, he had invested in Canadian North Pacific Fisheries. In its first year, it made a half million dollars. In its second year the business failed. He moved on to invest in Wallace Fisheries and became its president.
He knew from his business ventures in the prairies that there was a shortage of lumber there for building. Working with his partner, Davidson, Senator Peter Jansen of Nebraska, the Swift Brothers (meat packing), William Mackenzie and Donald Mann, he took over a sawmill and a company town 3 miles (5 km) upstream from New Westminster at a place called Millside at Fraser Mills (now part of Coquitlam). Once he persuaded the government to dredge the Fraser River to permit reliable passage of ocean going freighters to the mill, he reorganized it as Fraser River Mills (after 1910 known as the Canadian Western Lumber Company) with several large investors and a capitalization of $20 million. The plant and its yards covered 80 acres (320,000 m2) and took 1,030 men to run. With an investment of $500,000 in new equipment and the acquisition or formation of related companies such as The Canadian Tugboat Company and the Comox Logging and Railway to transport timber from the 75,000 acres (300 km2) of timber the company controlled between Comox and Campbell River on Vancouver Island, the company became the largest lumber and wood manufacturing company in the world. The normal capacity of the mill was 750,000 board feet (1,800 m3) of lumber a day. In 1912 the mill produced 175,000,000 board feet (410,000 m3) of lumber, enough to fill 42 rail cars a day. The mill ran around the clock. In the years after McRae's involvement, it eventually, in 1954, was acquired by Crown Zellerbach, and, with further acquisitions became Fletcher Challenge Canada Limited in 1987. By 1911 he had purchased canneries on Princess Royal Island, at Rivers Inlet and at Smith's Inlet. He introduced mechanized canning to the fish packing industry.
By 1914, when World War I began, McRae was also president of Anacortes Lumber and Box Company, vice-president of Columbia River Lumber Company Ltd of Golden BC which became a subsidiary of Canadian Western, vice-president of Canadian Collieries (Dunsmuir) Ltd. of Victoria BC and president of Wallace Fisheries.
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