DON MCMILLAN
THE MAN WITH A CONTINUING CURIOSITY By Georgia Maclean
D
onald Stone McMillan came into our world on February 4, 1921, not in a conventional hospital but in Mrs. Wilson’s Nursing Home on what is now Wembley Road but was then the Island Highway. His parents had arrived as homesteaders in 1913. His mother, a ‘city gal’ from New Jersey, had been a nurse in the US Navy. His dad was from Guelph, Ontario but was working south of the border, and, as luck would have it, had to take an injured co-worker to the hospital where he met his bride-to-be. She was persuaded to start a new life on Vancouver Island, with the assurance that she would encounter neither a tornado nor rattle snakes!
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They built their first family home on Bennet Road, carried water in buckets and cut wood to stoke the woodstove. Don attended the Little Qualicum School for eight years and then The Old School House on West Second Avenue in Qualicum Beach. By his own admission, he was no scholar. Donald Stone McMillan • Patricia Sibley photo While he was still in high school he built a small sawmill, and at that point a compassionate teacher encouraged him to follow his dream. Even in their teens, Don and his older brother Jack were accomplished woodsmen. When they wanted to go fishing and had no boat, they decided to build one. This first venture was such a success that they were soon in the boat building business. The Captain of the Princess Mary which made the Vancouver – Powell River – Hornby Island – Denman Island – Deep Bay – Union Bay– Comox run, was so impressed that he ordered one for himself.
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By 1940, however, Don realized that the sawmill business had more potential than boatbuilding, and McMillan Bros. Logging Company and Dashwood Mills became his sole focus. They acquired new timber lot licenses and from 1943-45 were commissioned to ship their lumber via east coast ports on merchant marine ships to the United Kingdom. Precisely where the shipments were going and how the lumber was to be used was considered classified information, but Don believed that it was bound for Liverpool and London to repair the docks that were so crucial to the war effort and had been so badly bombed. continued next page
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/ October 2010