[2] He was familiar with all aspects of his industry, and one observer noted: [He] knew the forest as a sailor knows the sea, and his success was largely due to the fact that he never overestimated its potentialities.[1]J.

R. Booth was born on a farm at Lowes near Waterloo (Shefford County) in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Lower Canada.

[12] He established his own lumber company and won the contract to supply wood for the Parliament buildings at the new Canadian capital of Ottawa, selected by Queen Victoria in 1858.

In 1867, he purchased, for $40,000,[14] the timber rights of John Egan's 250 square miles (650 km2) of pine on the Madawaska River in what is now Algonquin Park.

[14] During the latter half of the 19th Century, he amassed timber rights approaching 7,000 square miles (18,000 km2) in Central and Northern Ontario which he would harvest for his mills.

[13] He often went to his Algonquin timber limits in his own private railway car, working beside his men during the day and on business affairs most of the night, seldom sleeping for more than a few hours.

[13] He was always on the lookout for opportunities to reduce costs, and in 1894 he began investing in tugboats in order to accelerate the delivery of log booms to the Chaudière mill.

[21] White pine from Booth's lumber yards was used to build the decks on the ocean liners of the Cunard Line, including the Lusitania and Mauretania.

He expanded into the United States through the establishment of docks and a distribution centre at Rouses Point, New York, a planing mill and box factory at Burlington, Vermont, and a sales office in Boston.

[26] The extent of the fire led to a controversial proposal to restrict the amount of lumber being held in the yards, but intensive lobbying by Booth and other lumbermen effectively killed that measure as well as a later one in 1903.

[29] The construction of the station resulted in the water level of the Ottawa River being raised by 10 feet (3 m), which meant the end of log rafting there.

[31] The M&OJ had received a charter to build southeast from Ottawa to Coteau Landing on the north bank of the St. Lawrence River.

[37] However, the high prices demanded by local landowners prompted him to choose a location on nearby Parry Island, which would become Depot Harbour.

[42] Whether it was because Booth at age 74 was tired, or because he realized that competition from other transcontinental lines would soon cause serious problems for the CAR, he did everything possible in the early years of the 20th century to make every aspect of the railway profitable, and therefore attractive to potential buyers.

[48] He was also a director of Foster-Cobalt Mining which took part in the Cobalt silver rush,[1] whose origin took place on one of Booth's timber limits.

[49] Together with M.J. O'Brien, he also invested in The Dominion Nickel-Copper Company (owner of the Murray Mine) in order to create a potential competitor to International Nickel.

[50] It was subsequently sold to Frederick Stark Pearson, William Mackenzie and Donald Mann and became the British America Nickel Corporation, in which Booth was a director.

[51] In 1921, Booth was induced to vote in favour of a bondholders' reorganization scheme through the promised issue of $2,000,000 of British American stock.

The reorganization was later held by the Ontario courts as not binding on the minority bondholders, and the ruling was upheld by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council[52] in a decision that has influenced corporate jurisprudence throughout the British Commonwealth.

However, most other traces of Booth's interests in the Park (including a summer retreat at the Barclay Estate[63][64] on Rock Lake)[65] were razed by the Province of Ontario[66] as their leases on crown land ran out.

[69] It is located east of Kipawa, and is part of the unorganized territory of Les Lacs-du-Témiscamingue in the Témiscamingue Regional County Municipality.

[72] One of Booth's descendants noted in 2016 that the manner in which his predecessor had gathered his wealth was exceptional in comparison to "really old-school wealthy families" in Canada, "as most of them came from the booze business, which was illegal.