(died 14 April 1963, aged 86), business college proprietor. (George F. Smith) Born at Prescott, Ont. Parents: John Smith and his wife Elizabeth White. In his early years, till he had an injury, he was a champion bicyclist. He opened the Cornwall Commercial College in 1896 or 1897, and continued to operate it as its principal and proprietor for the astonishing period of two-thirds of a century. Smith was honoured by Cornwall civic officials at various points in his long career for his contribution to the community. An advertisement for the college in 1926 stated that it was the largest business training school in Canada east of Toronto, and that its graduates worked throughout the world, and that more than a thousand of them had gone to Montreal alone. The college, at which Smith was evidently an active teacher as well as an an administrator, taught typing, shorthand, accountancy, commercial law, and a wide variety of other business skills. A small man with a bow tie, he once suggested, or joked, that he was first man in Cornwall to wear a bow tie. Both men and women were students. Rhodes Grant, describing Martintown c. 1900, noted that “A few youngsters went to Commercial College in Cornwall.” The college provided a valuable training for students from a wide area of Eastern Ontario, including GC at a time when GC was almost without opportunities for professional training, and when, for women, working “away from home” usually meant domestic service in some big city. To grasp the importance of his college, it must be seen in its context of the contemporary local “bleakness.”

     Students at the college included Mrs Ishikawa, Edgar L. McNaughton and Jean-Paul Touchette. Canada’s future under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, O. D. Skelton, was a staff member. (Senior) George F. Smith died at Cornwall General Hospital. (three children) Burial was at Prescott. He was married to Harriett Prouty. The college, which had been in decline for some time owing at least in part to the increased availability of commercial courses in local secondary schools, closed the Sept. before he died.

Obituary Standard Freeholder (ND), with portrait, WSC 261 * Old Boys 1906 [60-61] with portraits of staff and students, 1905 * Old Boys 1926 12, 62, portrait * Marin & Senior: index * Rhodes Grant, i, 150 * 40th, 50 anniversaries of the college marked, SFH 27 Dec. 1937, 25 Jan. 1947