Lockley, Fred.  "History of the Columbia River Valley, From The Dalles to the
Sea." S. J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1928.  p. 365.
 
WILLIAM CORNFOOT

     One of Portland's self-made men and representative citizens was chosen by
Fred Lockley, the well known writer, as the subject of the following sketch,
which was printed in the Oregon Journal.
     "You have seen the name of William Cornfoot, the shipbuilder, in the papers
a hundred times, yet I doubt if you know very much about him.  He is a modest
man.  It is almost impossible to get him to talk about himself.  We took lunch
together a few days ago and I asked him if he would tell me something about
himself.  He shook his head and responded, 'Really, there is nothing to tell.'
I tried another tack.  I said, 'That you are interested in Portland and its
development is proved by the fact that you are chairman of the finance committee
and treasurer of the Rose Festival Association,'  and then without Mr. Cornfoot
realizing it, the conversation switched to a more personal channel.  I asked him
to compare the condition of the workmen in this country with that of his
birthplace in Scotland.  Mr. Cornfoot said, 'If you are going to use any of this
information I am going to give you, be sure to put it in the third person.'  I
am going to write it in my own way, omitting my questions, and quoting him
directly.
     "Said Mr. Cornfoot, 'I was born June 26, 1867, on the Firth of Forth, at a
little place called Kircaldy.  My father was a mechanical engineer.  In the old
country children go to school earlier than they do here.  In Scotland education
in the public schools is very practical, and very thorough.  I went to school
when I was five years old.  I had to stop school when I was through the fourth
standard, when I was twelve years old.  For the next two years I made candles
for the coal miners.  I not only poured the candles, but was my own salesman and
took orders for them.  During these two years, however, I was what they called a
half-time student, going to school half the day and working at candle making the
other half.
     " 'When I was thirteen I became a student teacher, attending classes half
the day and acting as an instructor during the remainder.  When I was fifteen I
was apprenticed to an engineering firm.  My wages were three shillings a week.
The second year I received four shillings a week, the third five shillings a
week, and an increase of a shilling a week with each year of my apprenticeship.
We worked nine hours a day.  I used by spare time after the work day was over,
going to night school or working over time making sugar mill and rice machinery
and marine engines, in which I was particularly interested.  I was paid at the
rate of twelve shillings per week.  Saturday was a half holiday, so I frequently
worked all night Friday night, as I could earn a few extra shillings this way.
After four years with this firm I went in with another engineering company that
made biscuit machinery and other apparatus for bakeries, in Edinburgh.
     " 'Did you ever notice what a large proportion of marine engineers are
Scotchmen?  Did you ever stop to figure out why this is true?  It is because the
man who creates machinery knows how to run it and takes pride in keeping it at a
high stage of efficiency.  The Scotch lads are apprenticed to the machine shops
and when they have served their apprenticeship they frequently sign on as marine
engineers.
     " 'As a journeyman I received twenty shillings a week.  When I was
twenty-two I went to Hartlepool, in the north of England.  It is a seaport of
considerable importance and the center of the shipbuilding and engine industry.
I went there because they were paying thirty-two shillings a week for skilled
workmen.  The highest I could get in Scotland was twenty-seven shillings, which
in our money is six dollars and seventy-five cents a week.  After working there
for some time I went to sea as third engineer on the steam schooner Topaz.  I
received eight pounds a month.  The second trip on this boat came near being my
last.  On our first trip we had gone to Rotterdam, thence to Vera Cruz.  On the
second trip we went direct to Vera Cruz and thence to New Orleans to load with
wheat.  We ran into heavy weather and our cargo of wheat shifted and we were
soon on our beam ends.  For forty-eight hours I stayed in the bilges, the water
going completely over me with every roll.  I had to stay down there to keep the
coal and ashes from getting into the suction bilge pumps.  The heavy seas would
sweep clear over the ship and come through the skylights.  I decided that this
experience as a mariner was sufficient, but after six weeks ashore I was offered
a berth as second engineer on the Free Lance, one of the White Ball ships out of
Cardiff, and accepted it.  We were in the Mediterranean and Black sea trade, but
we jogged pretty much all over the map.  Occasionally we got pretty heavy
weather in the Mediterranean and also on the Black sea, but it is much less
frequent than on the Atlantic.  For the next year or more we piled along the
Spanish or the Italian coast, with side trips to other points.  We made the
Bosphorus and the Dardanelles.  From the Black sea we went by way of the Danube
to Selina and Braile, ports in Roumania, to load with wheat.  On account of
wanting to carry as large a cargo as possible we put on no more coal than we
needed to carry us from port to port, particularly since the nearer we got to
the British isles the cheaper the coal could be had.  Our first coaling point
was Constantinople, then Malta, Algiers, Gibraltar, and from there on home to
the British isles. 
     " 'By this time I had received my certificate as second engineer.  This is
equivalent to the first assistant engineer's papers in the American service.  In
the United States service you receive papers as third assistant, second
assistant, first assistant, first assistant and chief engineer, but in Great
Britain the third engineer has no certificate.  They issue only first and
second-class certificates.
     " 'From the Free Lance I went on the Chittagong.  This vessel was named for
a town in India.  I made one of the longest continuous voyages I ever made, in
this vessel.  >From the Dutch East Indies we went to Rangoon, India.  From
Rangoon we went to Montreal.  We logged about two hundred knots a day.  It took
us sixty days and we made a little better than twelve thousand miles.  On that
trip we stopped in Ceylon for coal, then at Aden on the Red sea, then at Port
Said, then through the Suez canal to Gibraltar, and then straightaway to
Montreal.
     " 'After I had been on this vessel a little more than a year I received a
chief engineer's certificate and signed on with the Canton, which plied between
the British isles and South America.  We took wheat from Buenos Aires and
Rosario.  The principal cargoes out of the Argentine republic are wheat, beef
and hides.
     " 'I had been at sear now for five years, so I decided to stay ashore, but
after holding down a job ashore for three months I got lonesome for the smell of
the brine and signed as chief engineer on the Ely, a tramp steamer which plied
out of Cardiff.  It was in the fruit trade between the West Indians and
Philadelphia and Boston.  Our principal cargo was bananas.  We took the first
shipment of red bananas that was ever marketed in New York city.  We ran from
Bermuda to Boston, Philadelphia or New York from April to October, the end of
the fruit season, and plied through the winter between Cardiff and Bordeaux.  We
took coal to France and brought back French wines.  We would occasionally load
copper, cork or oranges at Spanish ports.
     " 'I had a most interesting experience the third year I was on the Ely.
While we were at Guantanamo, on the southern coast of Cuba, the United States
declared war against Spain.  We brought off the American consul and his wife,
with other American refugees, and saw the first boatload of marines landed.  We
had on a load of sugar.  We took the American refugees to the Bahamas and went
on to New York city to unload our sugar.  While there we were taken over by the
New York Sun and the New York Journal for the use of their war correspondents,
as a dispatch boat.  While there I had the pleasure of seeing the famous old
battleship Oregon come in after her long and eventful trip.  I met a great many
of the famous correspondents who covered the Spanish war down there.  We were
able to get cigars and cigarettes, while the naval officers were not always so
fortunate.  I had the pleasure of giving a box of cigars to Admiral Sampson.  We
had been given a tip that Cervera might attempt to come out with the Spanish
fleet.  We put every pound of steam we could carry and were cutting the corners
to see if we could get there in time so the correspondents could cover the
story.  The second mate was in charge.  He cut too close a corner in going along
the coast of Jamaica and went on a submerged reef.  He knew the coast, all
right, but he hugged the coast too closely.  We stayed on that reef for
forty-six days.  We secured pumps from the nearby sugar plantations and kept the
water out of her, but she pounded on the sharp coral reef and made a jagged hole
in the hull.  We went to Baltimore, where we were put in dry dock and repaired.
From there we sailed for Barcelona, Seville and Cartagena, loading Spanish
oranges for London.
     " 'After being at sea for some years I was asked to superintend the
building of a ship at Greenock.  She was christened the Adato.  She was a
fifty-seven hundred-ton steel ship.  I went with her as chief engineer.  You
will be interested to know that for common labor I paid twenty shillings a week
and for skilled mechanics thirty-two shillings a week in the building of the
Adato.  That means we paid eight dollars a week for the highest priced labor.
This ship was the first to put into Selina, Texas.  The canal had just been
completed.  We went there to get a load of cotton, wheat and vegetable oil.
When our new ship pulled into this new canal they held a big celebration.  A
number of railroad magnates were there and helped celebrate the event.  On our
way to Rotterdam the cotton caught fire.  We closed the hatches, pumped water in
the hold and ran for Falmouth, where we beached her and pumped her hold full of
water, finally extinguishing the fire.  When repairs had been made we went to
Malta to get a cargo for Liverpool.  We were then sent to Calcutta to load for
London.  From London we went to Cardiff, where we got a load of coal, which we
took via the Straits Settlements to Hongkong for the use of the British navy.
At Hongkong we got orders to go to Portland, Oregon.  This was in 1899.  We were
chartered for three years to a Mr. Graham of Portland.  We went to Portland
light and took on a cargo of flour at the Portland flouring mills.  We were here
ten days.  I went about quite a bit in Portland and like the city very much,
though I hadn't the faintest idea at the time that I should ever make my home
here.
     " 'We were held up at Kobe, Japan, for a month or more.  The man who
chartered us was unable to carry on his agreement, so we were chartered by the
Pacific Export Company, of which W. D. Wheelwright was president.  We were again
ordered to Portland to take on a load of lumber for Manila.  We came to
Portland, where we took on two million, five hundred thousand feet of lumber,
which we unloaded at Manila, taking on a load of hemp there for San Francisco
and Portland.  We made three or four trips to Portland.  On one leg of one of
our trips we took on coal for the Dutch East Indies.  All I need to do is to
shut my eyes and see the brown-skinned natives in their little canoes taking on
the coal as we lay out on the roadstead.  There were no facilities for landing
the coal, so we unloaded it in native canoes.  Over would go a canoe.  The coal
would go to the bottom.  Up would pop the native, right his canoe, and signal
for more coal.  The natives were at home in the water.  They can swim like
seals.
     " 'After several trips to Portland we took a cargo of phosphate to
Singapore for Wallaroo, in Spencer's gulf, Australia.  I had been married while
our ship was being overhauled when she was beached at Falmouth the first trip.
This was in November, 1900.  I married a schoolmate of mine, who had been raised
on the same street as myself, Miss Elizabeth McDougall.  I had been married but
three months when I signed up for a year's trip, intending to come back and get
a job ashore.  When the year was up the captain asked me to sign up for one more
trip, which would be for four months.  When the four months were up we were away
from home and he asked me if I wouldn't sign on for another year.  The last
year's enlistment expired at Sydney, Australia.  The captain tried to get me to
sign on for another year but I was anxious to see my wife.  I had been away
three years.  He finally paid me off, let me go, and I took passage for home.
     " 'After I had been home six weeks my wife and I talked it over and decided
that I had better quit the sea and go into business for myself.  I had been all
over the world and it seemed to me that of all the countries I had visited the
west coast of America was the best, and of all the cities I had seen that
Portland was the most beautiful, and that opportunities were best there.  My
wife and I took passage for Portland.  This was in 1903.  I had one friend in
Portland, a fellow townsman, Alex Wright, assistant cashier of the United States
National Bank, and I knew Sandy would stand by to give me a lift if I needed it.
     " 'When I arrived in the city I secured work in Burt Hicks' machine shop.
I at once bought a lot and built a home.  The day after we moved into it I came
down with typhoid fever.  For a while it looked as if I was going "west."  My
wife was expecting the stork shortly, and I couldn't bear to see her left alone
in a strange land, I had made some friends here, people from my own country.
The Scotch are not fair weather friends.  They stick by you through thick and
thin.  During my sickness I found what real friendship is.
     " 'I stayed in the Hicks machine shop for a year, and then started a place
of my own at Second and Flanders.  I built my shop on leased ground.  After a
few months I found my lease was no good, so I had to give up the shop I had
built.  Things looked a bit dark for a while, but I went to Albina, where I
leased ground on which I built a shop.  This was in 1905.  Times were a bit
hard, but I pieced out my revenue by doing boiler work for the insurance
companies, and occasionally I got a job a marine surveying.  I called my shop
the Albina Engine & Machine Works.  I hired tow or three men.  To meet the
payroll, I would go down to Astoria and meet incoming ships to see if they had
any repair work.  My having been a marine engineer helped me greatly.  Before
long I had six or seven men at work.  the number gradually increased to as high
as one hundred.  The shipmasters coming into Astoria would telegraph me to be
ready to make repairs for them.  Occasionally I would have to send a crew to
Astoria to do the work.  Soon I was repairing the government lightships and
lighthouse tenders and also doing considerable work for the quartermaster's
department.  One of my largest jobs for the government was installing the pumps
in the government dredge Chinook.  this was a forty-two thousand dollar job.
     " 'You may remember when the Japanese liner Kenkon Maru was wrecked on the
rocks at Puget sound.  This was three years ago.  She was given up as a total
loss by the underwriters.  The Japanese owners brought some divers out from
Japan, got it off the rocks, patched it up and towed it to Portland.  Fred
Duthie and I took the contract to repair her for one hundred and twenty thousand
dollars.  In two months we had made her ready for the sea.  Her owners sold her
at a high price.  She was an old English ship, the Elsie Craig.  Her Japanese
owners had picked her up for a song.  They got their insurance money, and just
after she was wrecked almost any old price could be got for any old ship, so
they made a clean-up.
     " 'While we were repairing this ship the A. O. Anderson Company asked me to
take a contract to build six steel ships for them.  I leased the Montgomery
property, on the east side between the two ferries.  I put in five slips and
took the contract to build six boats.  The first two were of thirty-three
hundred tons.  The last four were thirty-eight hundred-ton boats.  They were
commandeered by the government before they were launched.  In all we have built
seventeen boats for the government, most of them being of the thirty-eight
hundred-ton type.  For a while we had thirty-eight hundred men at work in the
shipyard.
     " 'When it looked as if the Rose Festival was going to have pretty hard
sledding, A. M. Grilley of the Young Men's Christian Association and Ira Riggs
called on me to act as chairman of the finance committee and treasurer of the
Rose Festival Association.  It was a hard and busy job, but we put it across and
came out with a clean slate.
     " 'I have watched with a good deal of interest the career of some of my
fellow townsmen.  You have heard, of course, of Andrew Weir.  He was in my class
at school.  His father was a cork cutter.  During the war Andrew Weir was given
charge of marine transportation for Great Britain.  He owns several sailing
lines and steamboat lines, so he was the right man for the job.  For his
services during the war he was made a lord of the realm, with the title of Lord
Inverforth.  He has oil interests, shipping interests and mining interests in
Australia.  He gave one subscription of five million dollars toward war work.
     " 'I knew the father of Sir Douglas Haig.  Sir Douglas was born eight miles
from my native town of Kirkcaldy.  Erskine Wemyss, who made such a name for
himself in the war, was born at Wemyss castle, six miles from Kircaldy.  Another
well known man who lives there is Admiral David Beatty.  You will find that many
of the men who had positions of responsibility during the war were of Scottish
birth or of Scottish parentage.  I must go now, but one last word.  Play up
Portland's need for the Rose Festival all you want to, but put the soft pedal on
William Cornfoot.' "
     As the owner of the Albina Engine & Machine Works, Mr. Cornfoot controls a
large industry thoroughly systematized in all of its departments, and
efficiently operated.  He is also president of the Albina Marine Iron Works;
general manager of the Columbia tile Corporation, of which he was one of the
organizers; and a director of the Portland Vegetable Oil Company.  As a
shipbuilder he has established an enviable reputation and his business acumen
and administrative power have brought success to every institution which he
represents.
     Mr. and Mrs. Cornfoot have two children, Elizabeth and Andrew, both natives
of Portland and high school graduates.  The daughter is the wife of Clarence
Maybee, who is connected with the Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railroad Company.
They reside in Portland and have one child, Elizabeth Mary.  The son Andrew
lives at home and is associated with his father in business.
     Mr. Cornfoot exercised his right of franchise in support of the candidates
of the republican party and is well informed on all matters of public moment.
He enjoys good music and is president of the Portland Bagpipe Band.  The
advancement of the city is a matter in which he takes much personal pride and
through his affiliation with the Chamber of commerce he is cooperating in well
defined projects for Portland's development and prosperity.  He is also
identified with the Order of Scottish Clans, St. Andres's Society, the British
Benevolent Association, the Benevolent Protective Order of Elks, and the Masonic
order, being a life member of the blue lodge.  Profiting by the lessons which he
learned in the hard school of experience, Mr. Cornfoot has demonstrated what may
be accomplished when effort and ambition combine.  At all points in his career
he has been actuated by worthy motives and high principles and his worth as a
man and as a citizen is uniformly conceded.
 
 
 
Transcriber's additional notes:
OR Death Index; William Cornfoot, died March 19, 1929; Portland cert. # 948

 
 
 
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Submitted to the Oregon Bios. Project in March 2006 by Diana Smith.  Submitter
has no additional information about the person(s) or family mentioned above.