Timothy Eaton was born in March 1834 in Ballymena, County Antrim, Ireland, and came to Canada in 1854 as a 20-year-old apprentice shopkeeper. After false starts — a haberdashery job in Glen Williams, a bakery in Kirkton that failed within months, a dry-goods store in St. Marys — he bought an existing business at 178 Yonge Street in Toronto in 1869 and changed Canadian retail forever.

Eaton's rules were radical: every good had one price, with no haggling and no credit, and every purchase came with a money-back guarantee — 'Goods Satisfactory or Money Refunded.' In 1884 he added the mail-order catalogue, and the Eaton's catalogue became a fixture of rural Canada, thumbed through in farmhouses from coast to coast. The empire he founded grew to employ more than 70,000 people at its Second World War peak. Eaton married Margaret Wilson Beattie in 1862; of their eight children, John Craig Eaton succeeded him. Timothy died of pneumonia on January 31, 1907, and was laid in the family's columned mausoleum at Mount Pleasant. In 1919 his employees donated life-size statues of him to the Toronto and Winnipeg stores — shoppers rubbed the statue's toe for luck, a tradition that continues today at the Royal Ontario Museum.