Philemon Wright (September 3, 1760 – June 3, 1839) was a farmer, lumberman and entrepreneur who founded the Ottawa River timber trade in 1806.

Wright's Town, later became incorporated in 1875 and renamed Hull, Quebec, and then in 2002, as a result of a municipal amalgamation, it acquired its present name of the City of Gatineau.

[3] Nicknamed "the Old Squire" by his employees and friends,[4] Wright was once described by John Mactaggart as "about six feet high, a tight man, with a wonderfully strange, quick reflective wild eye”.

[5] On May 16, 1782, Philemon Wright married Abigail Wyman, a Woburn woman whose ancestors were among the founding families of Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1628.

Their children (ages listed as of 1800, when they arrived in Hull Township) were: Philemon Jr., 18; Tiberius, 13; Abigail (Nabby, who died at 7 yrs.

He finally decided that the best location for a new settlement would be next to the Chaudière Falls, near the intersection of the Tenàgàtino-sibi or Gatineau and Kitchi-sibi or Ottawa rivers, where he found thousands of acres of good soil and vast amounts of timber.

[7] He applied for the lands of the Township of Hull under the "leader and associates" regime and after swearing allegiance to the Crown, received the grant.

He sold his holdings in Woburn and led a group of 4 other families and 33 labouring men[8] to the area, leaving on February 2, 1800, at the age of 39.

When a fire burned down the smithy, he rebuilt it in stone, adding a trip hammer mill, four forges and four bellows operated hydraulically.

He built a large bakehouse, shops for a shoemaker, a tailor, a bark grinding mill, as well as a tannery for curing leather.

Then, on June 11, 1806, he, his 17 yr-old son Tiberius and just 3 other men (London Oxford, a free black man & friend/associate of Philemon, Martin Ebert, and John Turner) began the treacherous journey down the Grand (Ottawa) River.

His earliest efforts to establish his settlement almost exhausted his entire capital and then, when his town was ravaged by a disastrous fire in May 1808, the village was practically wiped out.

A despondent Wright was ready to abandon the venture and possibly would have, if not for the encouragement he received from his sons Philemon Jr. and Tiberius to rebuild.

That same year, he and his son Philemon Jr. contracted Thomas Mears to construct a steamboat, which resulted in the Union of the Ottawa, which first set sail in 1823.

[17] The Union is described as “...measuring 125 feet on the deck, by 23 feet beam, drawing but little water, carrying 150 tons, and propelled by a 28-horsepower engine.”[17] Wright's son Ruggles Wright traveled to Europe to learn Scandinavian timber methods, and armed with this knowledge, returned home and constructed the first ever timber slide in Canada on the north side of the Chaudière Falls in 1829,[9] which allowed logs to be transported over the falls without having to use the previous method of waiting for calm water, which could take weeks.

He was a strong advocate for "scientific farming" and selective breeding,[16] and he was the first person to import prize Devon and Herefordshire cattle to the Ottawa Valley.

[16] By 1823, the Wright family had created several large and lucrative farms, some of which covered most of the land occupied by present-day Hull & Aylmer.

That 1st mansion burnt down in 1900 and he built another that ultimately became the very popular Hotel in Hull by the same name, where Louis Armstrong and many big bands came to play.

At the end of his life, Philemon Sr. retired to another farm, this time in Onslow Township, Lower Canada (now the province of Quebec).

[27] In Wright's papers, in the National Archives of Canada, he frequently refers to his properties in Onslow, both his timber cutting operations and his farming activities there, listing acreages of oats and potatoes and his numbers of cattle.

Joseph Bouchette's map, dated 1831,[28] shows a few buildings and a road in the easternmost lots on the river, which is most likely to be the location of Philemon's Onslow Farm.