Life and Family
Born in Brockville, Upper Canada (now Ontario), to a family of United Empire Loyalist stock, he was the youngest son of Hiram Fulford and Martha Harris.
In 1880, Fulford married Mary Wilder White (1856–1946), a socialite from Wisconsin, and had three children. Dorothy (1881–1949), their eldest, married Arthur Charles Hardy, son of former Ontario Premier Arthur Sturgis Hardy, in 1901 in a ceremony at Fulford Place, the family estate. Martha (1883–1910) died young, while giving birth. The long-awaited male heir arrived much later and after one near-fatal miscarriage, when Mary Fulford was 46 years of age. George Taylor II (1902–1987) was a politician himself (Member of the Canadian House of Commons) and owned Fulford Place until his death.
Fulford went to business college in Belleville, Ontario, and apprenticed with his brother, William, who was a dispensing chemist in Brockville. He took over his brother’s modest apothecary in 1874 and eventually built on it to form a successful patent medicine company.
He was elected to the town council in 1879 and served as an alderman for 12 terms. He was involved with the Liberal Party of Canada and became a friend of Sir Wilfrid Laurier. He was appointed to the Canadian Senate in 1900 representing the senatorial division of Brockville, Ontario. He served until his death in 1905.
George Taylor Fulford is reported to be the first Canadian fatal automobile accident victim on record. He was on a trip in Newton, Massachusetts with his business associate W. T. Hanson and their wives, when the chauffeur-driven car the men were riding in was sideswiped by a streetcar. Fulford died two days later, on October 15, 1905, at age fifty-three. His widow never remarried.
Fulford was a philanthropist, giving considerable donations to institutions such as the Brockville Rowing Club, the Wall Street Methodist Church, the Brockville General Hospital, and the YMCA; in his will, he left a large sum of money to establish a home for indigent women.
At the time of his death he was the largest single shareholder in General Electric and was considering buying a company called General Motors. Some of his descendants believe he was actually murdered. His great-grandson, Benjamin Fulford, former journalist for Forbes magazine in Japan, believes he was murdered in a conspiracy by the Rockefeller family (who made millions with Standard Oil) because he was going to fund Nikola Tesla's research into Free Energy. The driver, it is alleged who caused the fatal collision (but himself survived) had been given one weeks notice at the time of the crash.
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