Few Canadian families have had a greater impact on a city and country’s cultural progress than the Masseys.

Daniel Massey, a Vermont native of English descent, was at one time the British Empire’s biggest maker of farm equipment, at a time when most Canadians and Americans worked in agriculture. As recently as the turn of the previous century, more than 90 per cent of Canadians worked on a farm.

Well into the 1960s, and long after someone bearing the Massey name ran what became Massey-Ferguson Ltd., you could readily see a farm family’s loyalty from the colour of the harvesters, combines and tractors in its fields: yellow for Caterpillar Inc., green for Deere & Co., and red for Massey-Ferguson.

Eventually, the sophisticated agricultural equipment descended from the farm-implement business launched by Daniel Massey in Newcastle, Ont., not far from Toronto, in 1847 could be seen in South African veldts, in sheep stations in Australia and New Zealand, in Europe’s grain-growing regions and, despite the competition from Chicago’s mighty McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. (the future International Harvester), in plentiful number in the wheat and cornfields of the American breadbasket states of Illinois, Nebraska, Kansas and Iowa.

When it was still Massey-Harris, before merging with the Ferguson Co. in 1953, the company pioneered the first commercially successful self-propelled combine harvester in 1938, a tremendous global boost for an enterprise that since the 1850s had been based in Toronto, where it would remain until it finally was dismantled and sold off in pieces more than a century after it was founded.

Long before that, however, starting in 1926, Massey family members were no longer active in the former family business, whose sprawling operations by then dominated a 4.4-hectare district just west of the downtown Toronto core, along with significant operations in Brantford, Ont.

By that point, the leading Massey descendants had committed themselves to public service. Arts and culture were the preoccupation of the family, and that was evident while the Masseys still ran their business. Daniel’s son Hart took sole ownership of the business in 1855. His son Charles, an amateur musician along with brother Frederick Victor, launched an employee orchestra renowned for its public performances. Charles also launched Massey’s Illustrated, an early showcase for Canadian letters, notably poems and short stories, at a time when the Canadian literary scene was overwhelmingly dominated – as it would be until the 1960s – by U.S. magazines, while Canadian book publishers existed mostly to distribute popular British and American titles in the Canadian market.

In the late 19th century, the Masseys – staunch Methodists who dominated the business class in the former Upper Canada at the time – also donated church organs to Methodist houses of worship. They also sponsored Methodist Chautauquas held near Lake Erie, Ont., forums for guest speakers and panel discussions on social, scientific and religious topics of the day to which all were welcome.

Charles predeceased his father Hart, who in Charles’ name built the Toronto cultural landmark Massey Music Hall. When it open in 1894, Massey Hall, as it soon came to be known, was regarded as ranking sixth in the world in acoustic quality – a benchmark its successor, Roy Thomson Hall, still falls short of despite numerous renovations. In 1933, the Massey Foundation upgraded Massey Hall, decreasing its seating capacity to 2,765 from 3,500 in order to improve its sightlines.

Hart Massey, responsible for transforming his father Daniel’s machine shop into one of Canada’s earliest multinational businesses, died two years after the completion of the Massey Music Hall. In his will, Hart – in a pledge similar to that more recently made by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet – asked that the bulk of his estate be liquidated over the next decade with the proceeds donated to public institutions and causes.

Instead, the trustees of the estate, Hart’s children, decided to create the Massey Foundation, the first trust of its kind in Canada. Their intent was to launch new projects, not to fund existing ones, which they felt were better able to raise funds, having long been in operation.

The foundation’s first venture was to build Hart House, named in honour of their father. This athletic and cultural centre ostensibly for the students of the University of Toronto quickly became an amenity for the general public, hosting lectures and concerts.

The foundation doted on Hart House, adding the Hart House Theatre, a permanently endowed string quartet, and the purchase of a collection of rare instruments (the Hart House Viols).

In the late 1950s, the Massey Foundation commissioned Ron Thom, a graduate of the Vancouver School of Art, to design a post-graduate student residence at U of T, known as Massey College, one of Thom’s best works, making liberal use of wood, stone walls and other natural materials and incorporating a courtyard sanctuary. Since its 1962 completion, Massey College has functioned as an oasis of serenity amid the hurlyburly of Canada’s biggest university campus. And, like Hart House, the college too has become a public amenity, hosting cultural events and also safeguarding one of world’s most extensive collections of archival prints and typefaces cast from wooden and metal blocks.

Hart’s son Chester presented Toronto’s Metropolitan United Church, the principal house of worship for the United Church of Canada, with a carillon in memory of his wife, Anna. This bell tower was the first carillon in North America. (The Methodists in Canada united with the Congregationalists and several Presbyterian congregations in 1925 to create the United Church.)

Chester’s brother Vincent, the first Canadian-born Governor-General of Canada, had earlier served as president of the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto and on the board of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

Concerned about the smothering influence of U.S. culture on its Canadian counterpart, then Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent recruited Vincent Massey to chair the landmark Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, thereafter known as the Massey Commission.

In its 1951 report, the Massey Commission found that the development of Canadian culture was indeed undermined by an overwhelming foreign presence on the country’s airwaves, bookstore shelves and magazine racks – a condition that continues to this day, though in a somewhat diminished state. Ottawa eventually acted on the most important of the Massey Report’s recommendations, including the creation of the National Library of Canada and, perhaps most important, the Canada Council for the Arts, or simply the Canada Council.

For 58 years, the Canada Council has nurtured all forms of Canadian art, from novels to plays, sculpture to painting. It makes about 6,000 peer-reviewed grants each year to Canadian artists, many of whom have gotten their start from Canada Council funding of their earliest work.

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Reinforcing that effort, the council buys Canadian art through its Art Bank in a self-funding program by which acquisition costs are recovered from renting Canadian art to government and the private sector. With 18,000 works, the Canada Council’s Art Bank now holds the world’s largest collection of Canadian art, with emphasis on aboriginal art and programs designed to encourage cultural diversity among artists. The Canada Council also funds professional symphony orchestras across the country, a vital funding source in addition to box-office receipts, other government assistance and private-sector donations.

Massey-Ferguson, and the Newcastle Foundry and Machinery Manufactory launched 168 years ago that made some of the world’s first mechanical threshers, met a sad end in the 1980s, a victim of a sustained poor farm economy and complacent management. It was broken up, and the brand now belongs to the U.S.-based AGCO Copr.

The Massey civic-builder legacy is, by contrast, enduring, in the activities and historically important architecture of Massey Hall, Hart House and Massey College, and in the works of thousands of Canada Council grant recipients whose cultural gifts might not have been possible without the helping hand of businesspeople who understood that art is central to life.