McLaughlin Carriage Company Robert McLaughlin began building
carriages in 1867 beside the
cutters and wagons in his blacksmith's shop in
Enniskillen, a small village northeast of
Oshawa, Ontario. In need of more workers to build his horse-drawn carriages, staunch
Presbyterian McLaughlin moved to Oshawa in 1876. McLaughlin developed and (in the early 1880s) patented a
fifth-wheel mechanism, which greatly improved comfort and safety. Attracting a great deal of demand, he ignored tempting offers and elected to sell the mechanism to his competitors rather than license other manufacturers. This enthusiasm, now for his complete carriages, spread across Canada. Before the end of the century, there was a McLaughlin sales office in
London, England. On 7 December 1899, the carriage works was destroyed by fire. "We were helpless,"
R.S. "Sam" McLaughlin later told
Maclean's Magazine, "we could only stand and watch our life's work go up in flames. Not only we McLaughlins, but the six hundred men who depended for a living on the carriage works." The City of Oshawa lent McLaughlin $50,000 to rebuild. McLaughlin Carriage Company of Canada Limited was incorporated in 1901. Production numbers that year topped 25,000 units and included 140 different models, and sales exceeded one million dollars. The major carriage manufacturers did not close their doors but switched to automobile bodies. "We brought him [Milbrath] to Oshawa," Sam later recounted, "and installed him in one of our buildings, on the west side of Mary Street, which had been set aside as the automobile shop. We equipped it with automatic lathes and other machine tools, planers, and shapers - dozens of machines. From a Cleveland firm, we ordered cylinders, pistons, and crankshafts to our specifications, and engine castings to be worked in our own shop. The car was to be more powerful than the Buick." When McLaughlin wired Durant for assistance in September 1907, the next day, Durant and William H. Little, another Buick executive, arrived in Oshawa. The two carriage men, Durant and McLaughlin, hammered out a fifteen-year contract under which McLaughlin would buy
drive trains from Buick Motors. These cars were sold with the brand-name McLaughlin, although the name McLaughlin-Buick also appeared on some vehicles. This alliance with
Buick Motor Company was controlled by an exchange of a large parcel of McLaughlin stock for a corresponding amount of Buick stock. Durant, also a partner in
Durant-Dort, had a great deal in common with Sam McLaughlin, as both were part of the largest carriage companies in their respective countries. In 1908, the McLaughlins manufactured 154 vehicles, the same year that Durant leveraged Buick to form
General Motors.
General Motors of Canada General Motors of Canada was incorporated in 1918, when it merged McLaughlin and Chevrolet Canada. General Motors Canadian Corporation spent $10 million building a
Walkerville, Ontario, plant with the sale of the Chevrolet stock and establishing Canadian products. In 1923, the name of the Canadian-bodied model was officially changed to McLaughlin-Buick, and cars with this name continued to be produced until 1942. Later, production was labelled Buick without the addition of McLaughlin or Canada. Sam McLaughlin remained chairman of the board of General Motors of Canada, and vice-president and executive director of the parent company, until his death in 1972 at the age of 100. ==The automobiles==