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Manitobans Who Made a Difference

(Courtesy of the Archives of Manitoba)

Businessman and entrepreneur Benjamin Don Derigo Nojada Gomez da Silva Fonseca was an integral part of the economic, social, cultural, religious, and political life both of the Red River Settlement in the 1860s, and, over the course of the next four decades, of the city of Winnipeg. Arriving at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers in the spring of 1860, he later recalled that, "I saw St. Boniface on one side and Fort Garry on the other and I felt that here a city would spring into being and I was determined to be here to see it." Fonseca was born in St. Croix, Danish West Indies, of Spanish ancestry, and educated by Episcopal (Anglican) clergymen. He shortened his name and moved to New York City in 1840 where he worked in a mercantile firm, before studying to be an Episcopalian minister. When eyesight trouble interrupted his studies, he taught briefly before establishing a wholesale dry goods company in St. Paul, Minnesota, the future commercial centre of the American and the British northwest.

After spending the fall and winter of 1859-60 at Fort Abercrombie, Dakota Territory, Fonseca left with trade goods for the Red River Settlement. In the tiny village of Winnipeg, he opened a dry goods store where he sold a wide variety of pioneer goods, engaged in the freighting business, lectured on the West Indies, and acted as an executor for the estates of many Red River families.

In 1861, Fonseca married Margaret Ann Logan, the daughter of Red River resident, Thomas Logan. They had ten surviving children, five daughters and five sons. In the late 1860s the local newspaper, The Nor'-Wester, proposed Fonseca as a candidate for the position of American consul in Red River. Instead, the appointment went to Oscar Malmros of St. Paul. During the Red River Resistance, Fonseca was briefly arrested by Louis Riel's Provisional Government, but released after surrendering his American citizenship papers. By the early 1870s, Fonseca had become an auctioneer, a prominent businessman, and a land speculator, having purchased extensive land holdings comprising most of the Point Douglas area of Winnipeg and extending 2.5 kilometres (four miles) westward. Here he constructed his first home/store, where he and his family lived from 1861-71, a second residence at 39 Maple Street, and several rental buildings, including Fonseca's Hall which later housed Manitoba College, a constituent part of the University of Manitoba.

Many prominent Winnipeg families lived in Point Douglas. In 1871, Fonseca donated a log building for Winnipeg's first public school and served as a trustee for the first Winnipeg Protestant School Board. To provide an alternative to the water from the Red River, he had the first public well in Winnipeg dug in 1873. In addition to Fonseca's Hall at Main Street and Henry Avenue, Fonseca built a multiple dwelling, Fonseca Terrace, on Maple Street, and several hotels, one of which still operates (as the Mount Royal) on Higgins Avenue, originally called Fonseca Street.

Keenly interested in civic affairs, Fonseca was elected as an alderman for the North Ward, serving from 1874-78 and in 1880, as chairman of the Market, License, and Health Committee, he took a particular interest in city sanitary conditions, the passage of health by-laws, and the laying out and naming of streets in north Winnipeg. He and some associates donated land to the City of Winnipeg for the City Hall and for a city market, later Market Square. Fonseca served as a member of the first board of directors of the Winnipeg Young Men's Christian Association, president of the Old Settlers' Association, and on the board of the Winnipeg General Hospital. He was an organizer of the Winnipeg Board of Trade, later the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce, and was actively involved in the development of St. John's Anglican Cathedral, Christ Church Anglican, and Holy Trinity Anglican Church.

Fonseca was one of the businessmen successful in lobbying the Canadian Pacific Railway to cross the Red River in Winnipeg, not Selkirk, and in investigating the state of Winnipeg's civic finances in 1883. With Hugh Sutherland, he promoted a railway from Winnipeg to Hudson Bay in the 1880s, and in 1897 was a proponent of steam navigation between the Bay and Great Britain. An active member of the Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba, Fonseca published a large bird's-eye-view map of Winnipeg in the 1880s, and wrote On The St. Paul Trail in the Sixties (1900). He became a local expert in the development of horticulture and the study of insects, especially the canker worm and spruce saw-fly, which devastated the trees of the Red River Valley.

Fonseca Street, which ran from Main Street east to Meade Street, was completely renamed Higgins Avenue by 1904, leaving only Gomez Street, in Point Douglas, in remembrance of him. He is the subject of descendant Albert G. Fonseca's biography, From Palms to Maples: The Story of William Gomez Fonseca, One of Winnipeg's Earliest Pioneers. In 2001 William Gomez Fonseca was inducted into the Winnipeg Citizens' Hall of Fame.