This week in lieu of a sermon, our resident historian at St. John, David Clifford, prepared a fantastic historical overview of John McLennan, in whose memory St. John's church was erected. Sadly, the recording did not work, but David has provided the text of his presentation for your enjoyment.
Many thank to David for doing all this work!
For the 194th
Birthday of John McLennan, “By the Lake”
David Clifford
Everything we do here, today, is in the memory of
someone or something that happened long long ago. Take a look around you. The pews you are sitting on, the books you
are holding, the lights, the windows, the roof.
All these things were made by people, who felt a call to create
something that would help pave the way for the journey we embark upon from here. Jesus left us an ingenious monument, when after
supper, he lifted up the cup and said, “whenever you drink it, do this for the
remembrance of me.” Now, whenever I sit
down to a meal with my family or step up to the altar here with you, my
community, the message engrained in that memorial flows across thousands of
years – a message of hope, of suffering, of the knowledge of the God who loves
us, of all the lessons Jesus taught us – even of the promise of the eventual
coming again in glory of our Lord in the new kingdom! That’s a lot to swallow, but the simple act of
eating and drinking brings it to life for me every time!
Today I would like to invite you share in another sort
of memorial – a birthday party, and yes, there is delicious Kellie cake waiting
for you in the hall afterwards! I invite
you to celebrate with me, the One Hundred and Ninety-Fourth birthday of one
John McLennan, in whose memory this church was erected. That’s right: Mrs. McLennan and her daughter
built this church as a monument to the glory of God and in loving memory of
John McLennan. Well, who was he, and
what can we remember about him? And why
should we remember him?
John McLennan (no middle name) was part of the first
generation of ten brothers and sisters born in Canada to a Scots Presbyterian immigrant
family. It seems in this particular
family, the firstborn male was always named John, which can lead to a little
bit of confusion and requires some careful cross-checking when researching. He was born in Williamstown, on a cold
February 26th in 1821 to the famous ‘Squire’ John McLennan and first
wife, Margaret MacKenzie. Unfortunately,
there are no members of the McLennan family with us any longer to tell us about
him, so we must depend upon some fairly sparse historical records to find out
what John McLennan was all about.
We know that he left his father’s home to seek his
fortunes at an early age in what was then the commercial capital of Canada. He inherited part of the land upon which this
church now stands, when his father, Squire John passed away in 1866. At that time, he was engaged with his brother
Hugh, in dominating the rapidly growing export trade in prairie grain from
Montreal. The Crimean war had cut Europe
and especially Britain off from traditional supplies of wheat within Russia –
leaving Canada (and the McLennan brothers) to fill the gap. Earlier, while young John was cutting his
teeth in the banking industry in Montreal, brother Hugh had been learning the
ropes of the river trade, first serving as a purser on canal ships, and then by
operating docks and wharves up the St-Lawrence as far as Kingston. They joined together in 1853 and their
partnership, carrying on business as J&H McLennan, eventually owned a large
fleet of Great Lakes ships, barges and tugboats. They also controlled the first facility capable
of trans-shipping grain into ocean-going ships during one of the golden
industrial ages of Canada – the time of steamships just before the railways
were built. John McLennan rose to become
a vice-president of the Merchant’s Bank of Canada, which it just so happens, was
Sir John A. MacDonald’s bank at the time of Confederation. At the pinnacle of John’s business career, he
was elected president of the Montreal Board of Trade.
From census returns, we can learn that he was married in
1855 to Charlotte Adelaide Mair – an Anglican from Brockville and that soon
after, they were blessed with a son named Duncan and a daughter named Margaret
Julia. We can even see from the enumerator’s
returns, that they lived among the rich and famous of Montreal’s Golden Square
Mile – their next-door neighbours were the Peter Redpaths of Redpath Sugar.
In 1873, the Pacific Scandal rocked the government and
led to the downfall of Sir John A. MacDonald’s Conservatives. Sir John A. had a great vision for our infant
nation which was in danger of being shattered – many may know that British
Columbia had been promised a railway as a condition for Confederation, and
without it, our fledgling country might not have succeeded – it may have
disintegrated into what John McLennan called “the proverbial bundle of sticks,”
ripe for being annexed bit-by-bit by a hungry United States. All over the country, ridings were scoured
for popular candidates who could help Sir John A. re-form the government and
carry the Pacific Railway through and implement his protectionist National
Policy. With his native roots here and
his prominent business and social contacts – our very own John McLennan was persuaded
by Sir John A. himself, to run for the seat in Glengarry County. John moved back to the front of Lancaster in
1876, and although unsuccessful in his first by-election bid against local
Liberal Archibald MacNab, he was returned to Parliament in the 1878 landslide that
marked the beginning of Sir John A. and his Conservatives being returned to
power again and again over the next four Federal elections.
In Parliament, Mr. McLennan introduced several private
members’ bills and rose on many occasions to enunciate his views on a wide range
of topics such as protective tariffs, art, banking, industry, immigration,
insolvency, shipping, railways and canals.
He was a member of several standing committees relating to the banking
and transportation industries. On the
question of whether or not to give twenty-five million dollars and twenty-five
million acres of land to subsidize the railway promised to British Columbia, John
McLennan’s speech in Parliament ran to almost six thousand words and was
reprinted in full by the Cornwall Reporter for all to read. Copies of this speech can now be found in
many archives around the world from Australia to Great Britain, since it
possibly contains the most concise, factual and eloquent justification of a
government’s efforts to not only to create a railway, but to build a great
nation. Please permit me to read to you
a short excerpt of that speech, in which he poetically rejects assertions that
the great quantity of land to be given to the railway could be quantified by any
monetary value, but rather that its real worth is to the nation in its
settlement, these are his words spoken in Parliament on Tuesday the 21st
of December, 1880. He said,
“Land is not like the food in our larder, or the raiment upon our
back, or the creation of our handiwork, that perish with use. We might as well undertake to put a price
upon the light of the sun, upon the rain that falls from the clouds; we might
as well undertake to put a price upon the liberty which is our birthright, upon
the privilege of using our energies, and our faculties, as freemen. The value of the land is in its use by the husbandman,
and its development and occupation by a free, industrious and well governed and
contented people.”
At the end of just one term in office, John “By the Lake”
retired from public life altogether and settled down with his wife and children
on his estate here, called “Ridgewood.” He
spent a lot of his time reading, traveling and collecting art, as well as
speaking with the old-timers of Glengarry and Lancaster – and in the process, compiling
an important history of the Scottish migrations which would be quoted by the
great local historian, Judge Pringle in his definitive history of Stormont,
Dundas and Glengarry. He died in
Montreal after a brief illness in 1893, and was buried in the family plot on
Mont Royal, leaving behind an awesome legacy.
His J&H McLennan had been incorporated as the Montreal
Transportation Company in 1869 and later would be joined with several other
firms to form today’s Canada Steamship Lines.
The Merchant’s Bank of Canada would be one of many that strengthened the
Bank of Montreal to form part of the resilient chartered banking system we depend
upon today. The Port of Montreal, which
John and his brother Hugh so determinedly laboured to promote, has continued to
grow into a world-class facility that now stretches over 16 miles of waterfront
and handles annually over 2,000 ships from all over the globe – year-round. When John McLennan died, he left amongst
other things, $20,000 worth of shares in the Bank of Montreal (remember that
was par-value in 1893), almost all 200 acres of Lot 30, Concession 1, several
substantial houses as well as an important collection of works of art and
literature. His wife and children were
able to live on at Ridgewood in style, vacationing annually in Europe until
World War One broke out.
When John McLennan passed away, the nearest Anglican
presence at that time was in either Cornwall or Montreal, but the rapidly
expanding movement of the Church of England led to the establishment of the
Diocese of Ottawa in 1896. Raised as an
Anglican, and with several friendly neighbours and estate employees who also were
Anglican, Mrs. McLennan petitioned the first Lord Bishop of Ottawa, Charles
Hamilton, for a priest. She sweetened
the deal with a promise of $500 to build this church and a further pledge of
$300 annually to support the rector and by 1898, her efforts paid off . The priest arrived, the ground was broken, and
on January 29th, 1899 our little church was consecrated in a great
ceremony presided over by the Bishop himself.
Now this was not the case of a fantastically rich person
simply writing a cheque and presto! a church rises from the ground. Mrs. McLennan had to work hard at it – she
canvassed all of her friends and relatives and held grand receptions both at
the manor house and in Montreal to secure all the furnishings and funds to
build this. The bells, the stained-glass
windows, the decorations are all an example of this. This church is as much a monument to the
efforts of Charlotte Adelaide Mair McLennan, her daughter Margaret Julia, and all who
followed them, as it is to the memory of John.
Now I ask you to contemplate – every time you step into
this place – what message is she sending us with this monument? An Anglican Church dedicated to the memory of
a Scots Presbyterian? Is it a house of
Light, built by a Lady, to fondly remember the passage of Light through her own
life? Can we find a parallel in the
namesake of our waterfront place of worship?
St-John, an ordinary boy who left everything, with his brother to answer
a call to a greater good – the brothers who were nicknamed by Jesus the “Sons
of Thunder,” and he who living to a great age, wrote the greatest Revelation of
all? Is it a memory of a man who, it can
not be found with any certainty to have been a church-goer at all, but who did
preach voluminously and at length on the virtues of that great highway of steel
to the Pacific coast that would stitch together a nation, and who did his own
small part to help build the wonderful country we now know?
I respectfully submit to you, these bare facts of
history, and leave it for each and every one of you to decide just what is the
meaning of the message on that brass tablet hanging on the south wall, that
says: “To the Glory of God and in Loving Memory of John McLennan.”
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