(7 Nov. 1892-7 Jan. 1976), mayor of Toronto. (Nate Phillips, Nathan Phillips Q. C.) Born in Brockville, Ont. Parents: Jacob (Jake) Joseph Phillips and his wife Mary Rosenbloom. He grew up in Cornwall, Ont., where his father was in the men’s clothing business. Nathan Phillips became a lawyer, and was a member of Toronto City Council for 35 years, and mayor of Toronto from 1955 to 1962. He was Toronto’s first Jewish mayor, and was mayor during a period of especial growth for Toronto. He was the principal promoter of the present Toronto city hall, and the open space before the city hall is called Nathan Phillips Square in his honour. One of the best-known Canadians of his time, Nathan Phillips never lived in GC, but his GC connections through his mother have often been emphasized. She was born at Loch Garry, GC, in 1871. She was the first cousin of S.W. Jacobs the MP and she and her husband were married in 1890 at the Montreal home of William Jacobs, the MP’s father. In a well known passage in R.J. Fraser’s As Others See Us (1959), Fraser writes that “From three little Loch Garry homes, standing almost side by side in log cabin days, came men who today occupy distinguished posts in the religious, governmental, and judicial professions of Ontario.” The men he was referring to, none of them actually born at Loch Garry, but descended from Loch Garry families, were Bishop W.J. Smith, Judge Allan Joseph Fraser (see life of John Fraser, auditor general), and Nathan Phillips. Dick Beddoes, the Globe and Mail columnist, remembered that “responding to the corn in everyone,” the populist, gregarious mayor, who liked to proclaim his identification with various ethnic groups, “would tell Scotsmen that his mother was born in Glengarry, Ont.” Phillips was one of several people who promoted the restoration of the old burial ground (where the graves include that of Simon Fraser) at St. Andrew’s in the 1930s. (AUSU, 260-261)

Nathan Phillips, Mayor of All the People (1967), autobiography * Fraser (1959) 258-261, 288 * obituary, with editorial tribute, portraits, and a fine cartoon of the ex-mayor waving goodby from behind the city hall towers, Globe and Mail 8 Jan. 1976 * Dick Beddoes, “To Nate, with Love,” Globe and Mail 9 Jan. 1976 * MacGillivray & Ross 128 * liquidation sale of his father’s store?, Cornwall Freeholder 11 Feb. 1915 (advert.) * Stiles 209 (N. Phillips’ Cornwall store, evidently that of Nathan Phillips’ uncle; see Standard Freeholder 14 June 1937 for expected closure after over 50 years)