Identity area
Type of entity
Authorized form of name
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Other form(s) of name
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Description area
Dates of existence
History
Archibald Ogilvie Leighton was born in 1880 in Ballycarry, Northern Ireland, the youngest son of John Leighton (1841-1928), a Scottish-born attorney who settled in Ireland after his marriage to Caroline Wilson (1849-1885). Archie—or “A.O.”—was the sixth of eight children and the youngest of three sons. As a young man, Archie was apprenticed in the building trade and in 1902 was sent to Sligo, on Ireland’s west coast, to supervise the building of a post office. It was here that he met and became engaged to Gertrude Ann Hamilton. In 1906 he moved to the United States in pursuit of work, intending to take advantage of the construction boom in San Francisco that followed the great earthquake. However, he ended up in Philadelphia; after Gertrude arrived the same year in New York and they were married, they settled just north of Philadelphia, where their first child, Alexander (Alec), was born.
In 1909 Archie joined forces with a wealthy businessman named A.D. Leighton to form the contracting firm Irwin and Leighton Company. As the company grew more prosperous and a daughter, Gertrude (“Gussie”), was born, the Leightons moved further out of the city and began to spend their summers on the New Jersey coast. However, the combined threat of killer sharks and a polio outbreak in 1916 prompted them to start summering in Nova Scotia, where Archie—(and later, Alec) eventually established second homes in Digby County.
In 1955 Irwin and Leighton was sold to its employees and in 1958 Archie’s wife, Gertrude, died. Some years later Archie married Rose Witowski. He continued to work for the firm and was serving as Chairman of the Board when he died in 1964.