Ayr was once the empire of entrepreneur A.C. Gillies
When you needed a prescription filled in Ayr, you visited A.C. Gillies’ Drugstore. When you needed your Ford Model T finetuned, you went to A.C. Gillies’ Ayr Garage. When you wanted a nice fresh fish for supper, you threw your line into A.C. Gillies’ Trout Pond. And today, when you want a well-produced postcard view of Ayr, you look for the name A.C. Gillies on the back.
Alex Conkey Gillies was born in Galt in 1868 but left his mark in nearby Ayr, where he lived until his death 80 years later. He married Emma Thorne in 1893 and they had one child, John, known to many as Jack. Before age 30, A.C. had become an Ayr druggist but often billed himself, in the style of the era, as a chemist. He didn’t just dispense medicine: Alex’ store also sold stationery such as books, pens, rulers, blotters, paper and, when they became a public craze in the early 20th century, postcards. After a half century at 44 Stanley St., he sold the business to Eric Toye in 1948.
While his son was fighting for Canada during the First World War, Alex Gillies opened the village’s first service station, Ayr Garage, which Jack operated after returning from military duties. Jack sold new and used cars and overhauled them until retiring in 1949, when Orville Gingrich became the new owner. Ayr Garage had become a bit of a tourist attraction when Alex and Jack began a tradition of decorating the building with Christmas lights.
A.C. was more than a skilled and far-seeing businessman; he served his community by sitting on council for five years between 1908 and 1915. A.C. Gillies’ trout pond was right beside the garage and was a big tourist lure for the first half of the century. Alex stocked it, built walkways and fences to accommodate the large Sunday crowds and made a small profit from renting fishing poles and bait. At few other places in Ontario could youngsters kneel beside a pond with a piece of bread and have a three-pound trout surface and nibble it from their fingertips.
Alex Gillies died in 1948, followed within a half dozen years by his wife Emma and son John (Jack). Marjoree Gillies was Jack’s only child and she became wife to Ken Lingelbach, the village jeweller and clock expert. Marjoree passed away in 2006, the last direct link to A.C. Gillies.
Postcards issued by A.C. Gillies are today’s focus but in fact he did not make them. Common to that pre-First World War era, the actual printing of most postcards issued in Canada was done in Germany. After being contacted by a sales rep, Gillies would have agreed to provide a series of photographs which would have been sent to Germany for layout, colouring, captioning and printing. The finished cards were then shipped back to Gillies who sold them in his drug/stationery store and perhaps through some other shops in the village.
The three examples shown here, all mailed in 1911-1912, are representative of Gillies’ work. Without definite proof, I am crediting Alex with taking the actual photographs. There’s a distinct style to most of his work; greenery frames the scenes, most evident here in the Gore and Piper Street cards. He also enjoyed machinery and interesting buildings: the CPR scene at the north end of Northumberland Street combines five buildings, an old steam roller and several horses and wagons.
No one knows how many different views A.C. Gillies published but the visual record of Ayr is all the richer for his participation in the postcard craze of a century ago. Many have been used in publications over the years without credit and one of the goals of this column is to put credit where credit is due.