126 York Street
By Nancy Miller Chenier
Lowertown has numerous early entrepreneurs to celebrate. One of them is Marie Corinne Lebel Major, who started her married life on Murray Street and expanded a local family business after her husband’s early death. For those who pass 126 York Street and wonder about the S. J. Major Ltd. inscription on its facade, here is the story of the woman who made it happen.
Marie Corinne came from a family with experience in the business sphere. Brother Georges was one of the merchants forming the Ottawa Canning Company and another brother, Godfroid, was President of the Ottawa Wine Vault Company on George Street, the current location of the Ottawa School of Art.
When Marie Corinne married Sylvanie Joseph Major in 1883, she was a teacher, one of the few professions then open to women at the time. In 1889, shortly after their son Ascanio was born, the family moved from Orleans to Ottawa and set up a wholesale grocery business at the corner of Murray and Dalhousie, with their home next door at 143 Murray Street.
In 1903, when Sylvanie Joseph died, Marie Corinne was in her early forties with a young teenage son. She continued to expand the family’s wholesale grocery business while Ascanio finished his schooling at La Salle Academy and the University of Ottawa. Within 10 years of her husband’s death, in 1913, she was overseeing the construction of 126 York, designed by Colborne Powell Meredith. In 1914, an advertisement in the Canadian Grocer magazine labelled the building as the “most modern wholesale warehouse in Eastern Canada.”
Marie Corinne retained her role as president of the company but stayed in the background as her son Ascanio became the public face of the business. In 1924, while still in his thirties, he became the first French Canadian and youngest person to serve as president of the Ottawa Board of Trade. In 1925, he was a director and spokesperson for the newly formed National Grocers Association. S.J. Major Limited was made an affiliate in a merger that brought together more than 25 stores and about 35 distributing outlets in Ontario.
Marie Corinne Lebel Major died in 1947 at her home on Wilbrod, in one of the apartments built ten years earlier by the family as a new venture into real estate and development through Major Investments Limited. As her obituary in the Ottawa Journal observed, her organizing and executive ability had made S.J. Major Limited one of the largest companies of its kind in Ottawa.
A subsequent front page story in the Ottawa Journal reported that her estate was worth over a million dollars, with money and possessions bequeathed to family members and charities. This woman who conducted her business life without any great public fanfare was probably the first francophone woman in Ontario to possess such wealth. The building at 126 York stands as a testament to the woman who made the legacy of S.J. Major possible.