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To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.

The first woman to serve as publisher of a major Canadian daily newspaper didn’t come to her position with a silver spoon. She had working-class callouses on her fingers, starting as pre-teen telegrapher tapping out messages in Morse Code.

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Born in Ireland in 1856, Sara Ann (Maclure) McLagan came to British Columbia with her mother, Martha McIntyre, in 1859. Her father, John Cunningham Maclure, was a sergeant and surveyor with the Royal Engineers in New Westminster during the Fraser River gold rush. After his wife arrived, children quickly followed. Sara’s younger brother Samuel later became one of B.C.’s most eminent early architects.

Maclure elected to homestead on Matsqui prairie. He had worked for a company planning a telegraph line to Russia. When it failed, he shrewdly located where two Western Union lines intersected. Martha’s parlour became a repeater station. Then he taught Sara telegraphy. At 12, when the region was threatened by a forest fire, she alerted New Westminster. At 14, she had a full-time job at New Westminster’s Western Union telegraph depot. She was an operator at Matsqui by 15, handling all the press dispatches from the United States. By 16, she was a line tester and manager of repairs from New Westminster to Yale. At 19, she was in the Victoria office and became its manager.