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MINGO, GEORGINA (Georgiana, Georgianna) (Whetsel (Wetzel, Whetzel); Moore), entrepreneur; b. 4 July 1846 in Pictou, N.S., daughter of Robert B. Mingo and Christina McKenzie, farmers; m. first 23 Dec. 1872 Robert W. Whetsel (d. 1885) in Boston, and they had four children; m. secondly 28 Nov. 1901 Edgerton (Eggerton) T. Moore (d. 1916) in Worcester, Mass.; d. 24 Nov. 1919 in Halifax.

Born into a mixed-race family, Georgina Mingo grew up in Pictou and in Bedford, N.S., where her parents had relocated sometime around 1858. She moved to Boston in the early 1860s, joining her elder sister and possibly a brother there. At the time of the Massachusetts census of 1865, she was working as a domestic servant. In Boston she met Robert Whetsel, a widower from Saint John who had left the United States for New Brunswick around 1852 to escape the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. When they married in 1872, Georgina was 26 and Robert 49. Whetsel, a former barber, conducted an ice business in Saint John from his home at 93 Prince William Street, where he also had an oyster saloon. Over the next eight years, the couple would have four children, a son and three daughters.

In 1876 Robert incorporated the Saint John Ice Company with George Sparrow and Israel Thomas Richardson. George’s brother Cornelius joined the partnership at a later date. The business flourished during the 1870s, and Robert and Georgina acquired other properties in the downtown area. These included, after the great fire of 1877 [see Sylvester Zobieski Earle*], a new residence on Carmarthen Street. According to business directories of the period, the couple operated the ice business from headquarters at 76 Germain Street and from another location near the North Market Wharf.

Misfortune struck the family when Robert died suddenly in 1885. Seven years earlier they had lost his son Robert Henry, who was just 24. Then, while visiting her grandparents in Bedford in September 1887, one of the Whetsels’ younger girls, Irene M., succumbed to a chronic respiratory condition; her passing was followed by the death in Saint John of her twin sister, Christina A., two months later. In the midst of these tragedies, Georgina continued to attend to the family enterprises. In an 1887 report highlighting her unique position as a female entrepreneur, the Saint John Daily Telegraph revealed how taxing the management of the ice business must have been. Perhaps because of its demands, she sold the saloon that year to the firm of Mitchell and Findlay. David Mitchell, who operated the establishment on his own in subsequent years, advertised himself for some time as “successor to Mrs. Whetsel.”

While her husband had had a lease to cut ice at Lily Lake, at some point Georgina shrewdly negotiated with the Saint John Horticultural Association, which owned the property, for an exclusive contract to harvest there. Because the costs of transport were so critical to profitability, this monopoly on ice within the city limits kept many competitors at bay. The business of cutting, hauling, and distributing ice was a massive undertaking. According to the Daily Telegraph’s 1887 report, ice was “the one indispensable commodity of the summer season.” Through the winter of 1886–87 Georgina Whetsel had deployed “a large force of men” and nearly 30 wagon teams to cut and load 7,000 tons of ice, about double the amount that her husband had taken, the blocks being stored in five warehouses on Leinster and Duke streets. The following year the Daily Telegraph noted that she expected to cut another 7,000 tons, at a cost of $500 a week for labour.

Distribution across the city started at 2:00 a.m., with deliveries made to household consumers before hotels, businesses, vessels, and the Intercolonial Railway were accommodated. As technological advancements enabled brewers, butchers, grocers, and commercial operations to increase the size of their refrigerated units (which could keep ice, but not make it), Whetsel adopted the latest techniques and machinery to meet the demand. By 1894 the output from Lily Lake would reach 8,000 tons, and at the end of the century it had grown to 10,000. She shipped to other parts of the province and outside New Brunswick as well. To help her run her business she had hired her brother Robert H. as an assistant around 1887.

Whetsel’s success as an entrepreneur attracted notice south of the border. In 1891 the Woman’s Column (Boston), a newspaper issued by the National American Woman Suffrage Association, published a short notice about her control of Saint John’s ice trade, an item that was picked up by the Washington Bee (Washington, D.C.), a weekly widely read by African Americans. A briefer account, not mentioning Whetsel by name, appeared in newspapers throughout the United States. Whetsel’s clever business practices were also mentioned in The work of the Afro-American woman, a book brought out in 1894 by the prominent African American writer and activist Gertrude Emily Hicks Bustill Mossell.

That Whetsel had become not only an accomplished businesswoman but was also emerging as a Black female social leader came to public notice following Saint John’s first winter carnival, held on 27 Feb. 1889. Mayor Henry John Thorne declared a public holiday and kicked off a large parade. Without consulting Whetsel, it seems, a group entered a float entitled “Ice House Delegates.” While the intention may have been to profile her company in an amusing manner, all the role-playing participants had blackened faces and the float apparently suggested that her wagon teams and facilities were not well maintained.

In a strongly worded letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph, published on 1 March, Whetsel admonished those who had put forth this impression of her operations. She felt it was “not at all fair.” “All the intelligent people of St. John will agree with me that I do my ice business in a way that ought not be ridiculed,” she asserted. “I spend a great deal of money every year to keep the wagons, horses, harness, everything in regards to my business in keeping with our nice city.” Noting that she hired as many whites as she did Blacks – “it makes no difference to me as long as they can do their work what color they are” – she complained about “the African caricatures” that portrayed Black residents “always in the lowest and most degraded state.” “This may be [considered] a mark of culture and refinement,” she concluded, “but pardon me if I don’t think so.”

Whetsel’s confidence as a spokeswoman for the Black community moved eventually into the political sphere. At some point she had met Josephine St Pierre Ruffin, an American advocate for Black women’s rights and a future founder of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). As publisher and co-editor of the Boston newspaper Woman’s Era, Ruffin featured Whetsel in the June 1895 issue, possibly the first time a Canadian Black businesswoman had achieved such extensive recognition. In July 1896 Whetsel was a delegate to the conference in Washington of the National Federation of Afro-American Women. It was at this gathering that the NACW was formed.

Many residents of Saint John were likely shocked to hear in March 1900 that Whetsel had decided to retire. Although she was still in good health at 54, the same could not be said for her remaining daughter, Mary Elizabeth, who suffered from a weak heart. The principal negotiator to purchase her ice business was attorney Andrew George Blair, son of former premier Andrew George Blair*, a shareholder in the new Saint John Ice Company Limited. The agreement was for the sale of the business and property, including the six warehouses Whetsel then had, the offices, the wagons, and a crop of ice in storage estimated at 10,000 tons. The sale was considered of sufficient interest for the details to be copied from a Saint John newspaper by the Colored American (Washington) in June 1900. Although the price was not officially disclosed, the St. John Daily Sun claimed in December 1901 that Whetsel had sold the business for $33,000, well over $1.2 million in early-21st-century spending power.

In October 1900 Whetsel had advertised to let her house at 43 Carmarthen Street, and she and her daughter travelled south. Mary’s health did not improve, however, and she died three months later. Perhaps it was then that Whetsel decided to seek the comfort of her widowed sister, Maria J. Church, or of other siblings living in the Boston area. There she met Edgerton T. Moore, a retired dry-goods merchant from Bermuda, who was some 17 years her junior. In 1901 they were married in Worcester, Mass., but they did not settle in Bermuda, the Moncton Daily Transcript reported, “owing to the bride’s objection.” Possibly her reluctance had to do with the fact that she had already acquired “a handsome residence” in Bedford whose “site was a grand one on a hill overlooking the basin.” It seems likely that she had inherited her parents’ property and had built a new home there. After a wedding trip to Washington and other points in the United States, the couple made their way to Bedford, where they spent their final years. Edgerton Moore died at their residence after a brief illness in 1916, and the following year Georgina put the house up for sale. In 1919 she suffered a cerebral haemorrhage while returning by train to Halifax from an unknown location. She passed away there at the Victoria General Hospital on 24 November. Her surviving child, Frank Herbert, would die in 1939.

With her death, the curtain finally closed on an extraordinary chapter in the commercial life of Saint John. It had highlighted the determination of a woman to succeed on an equal footing as an entrepreneur in a man’s world and of a Black woman to overcome the general hostility that faced members of her community and impeded their social and economic progress. When she announced her retirement in 1900, the St. John Daily Sun summarized the common view of Georgina Whetsel as a leading citizen whose “extensive business … has been the outcome of the energy, honesty, courtesy and tact of a first-class business woman.” “Mrs. Whetsel,” it concluded, “has brought the ice business up to the high standard that it now occupies – a standard never attained in the city before, and it is probable that she stands alone as a most successful woman in a like enterprise.”

Roger P. Nason