(5 April 1827-8 Dec. 1925), lumberman and railway builder. Booth is one of the legendary figures of Canadian history. The connection with GC is that after the attempt by D.A. Macdonald and others to build a railway linking Ottawa and the Grand Trunk Railway by way of Alexandria was destroyed by the financial crash of 1873 Booth took the leading role in amalgamating their companies and continuing and extending the original project by building the Canada Atlantic Railway in the 1880s to connect Ottawa and Boston. Alexandria, which up to this time had had no railway station, now flourished as one of the more important stopping points on the new railway. Maxville grew around the station placed between St. Elmo and Dominionville. The trade of GC was fundamentally reordered as northern GC with its own stations no longer relied on Lancaster as a railway outlet. A GC native, Edward McGillivray, was named president of the railway in 1881.

Life by Jamie Benidickson, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, XV, 130-134 * MacGillivray & Ross 147-153 * Allan Bell, A Way to the West (1991) [a history of the Canada Atlantic Railway]