Casa Loma (the Dupont connection?) Day 5

Our last full day in Toronto (for a while; we come back to fly to NY on the 31st).

We decided to visit Casa Loma, a mad castle that was built in the early 1900s by Henry Pellatt. He was a Toronto financier and industrialist and fiercely patriotic to the Queen and then the King of Britain.

He made his fortune by buying up shares in the land in Western Canada and made millions when people went to live there and also from founding (and getting the monopoly on)Toronto's electricity supply.

He then started to have this crazy castle built but the First World War stopped the building process and then the electric company was made public and his next venture into flight was appropriated by the war office. He also financed a hydroelectric power station at Niagara but it was also appropriated. So he lost his fortune and had to sell the house and all the belongings.

It's a fascinating story which you can see at www.casaloma.org if you are interested.

We tried to find out why the street and subway station were called Dupont whilst we were there but no-one seemed to know. I have sent an email to the Toronto genealogical society to ask if there was a famous Dupont who lived here. Maybe we have a long lost branch of our family here. (For those of you who don't know my mum is a Dupont)

Tomorrow we pick up our hire car and we are heading South, but I think we will next have internet access when we get to Niagara on the 3rd.