Last week, I promised to start putting some flesh on the village map that Jim Fletcher so kindly drew for me of Dunvegan in the 1940s and 50s. Before I do though, I wanted to fill in some of the blanks in an item in my January 5th column on a young boy from these parts who ended up being elected mayor of Côte St. Luc in 1939.
In addition to his day job as an engineer, Donald Fletcher was an Alderman in the tiny Montreal suburb for ten years before being elected Mayor, a post he held for twelve years. Ex-mayor Fletcher died in 1962 at the Montreal General Hospital leaving behind an obituary that was very short on details of his early years. The article reporting on his death in the February 15th, 1962 edition of the Glengarry News was equally unenlightening. I concluded the item with an appeal for more information aimed at Fletcher family members with Dunvegan roots. The appeal bore fruit in the form of an email from Faye Zsadany from Burlington, Ontario.
As you’ve no doubt guessed, Faye’s maiden name is Fletcher. In fact, she’s Jim Fletcher’s kid sister and, as I can attest, is the de facto keeper of the Dunvegan branch of the Fletcher family tree. From her meticulous genealogical research, ‘Mayor’ Donald was the first-born child of Kenneth Fletcher and Sarah Campbell. Born in Dunvegan in 1873, records show that Donald was given to his father’s parents ‑— Duncan and Margaret Fletcher of Dunvegan — to raise. Which suggests that Donald’s mother died giving birth. This was strike one in the family’s run of bad luck.
Eight years later, his father Kenneth remarried. He and his bride, Christy Ann Cummings, were farming in Roxborough Township and, shortly after the wedding, young Donald joined them. By 1888, the growing family (Donald eventually had one stepsister and three stepbrothers) was living across the Ottawa River in Litchfield, Quebec. Strike two was when Donald was a teenager. His father Kenneth was seriously injured in an accident and was an invalid for a few years before succumbing.
And strike three was Donald’s loss of his four siblings. His three half-brothers all died of Scarlet Fever. And his half-sister — who Faye told me in her email, “was reportedly stunning in appearance with wavy auburn hair” — died in her twenties, just before her wedding day.
No wonder the young lad never looked back to his Dunvegan roots, choosing instead to make his home in the fledging town of Côte St. Luc. With a string of bad luck like that following his family, I can assign him no blame. (I was going to use the more colloquial synonym ‘dogging’ in the previous sentence, but I got the memo just in time. Apparently, its meaning has been changed from “chasing, coursing, following, shadowing, tagging, tailing” and the like to “engaging in sexual acts in a public or semi-public place or watching others doing so.” Who knew?)
Letum Erratum
Faye Zsadany also kindly pointed out an inaccuracy in my column of January 5th, 2022. In it, I mentioned that Donald’s daughters both died in 1994: Grace in Montreal and Jean in Vancouver. It turns out that Jean actually predeceased her sister, dying in 1987. And in Montreal, not Vancouver. I had unearthed the wrong obituary.
There also seems to be a discrepancy in the former mayor of Côte St. Luc’s name. In the genealogical outline Faye sent me, he is identified as Dan or Daniel Fletcher. And yet he is Donald Fletcher in his obituary and in the February 15, 1962 Glengarry News article. I’ve asked Faye for clarification.
Last train to Maxville
I recently received a short note from reader Ken McEwen of Blackburn Hamlet. He too gets the News via snail mail and had just seen the photo of a steam locomotive on page 11 of the January 19 issue. “Just a wee observation,” he wrote. “Maxville was served by the Canada Atlantic, Grand Trunk, and CNR, in that order.” He went on to explain that the photo depicted a Canadian Pacific engine on a Grand Trunk or Canadian National track, something that was unheard of. He concluded, “… the station is similar to what Maxville once had, sadly now gone, but the photo seems misidentified.”
I checked with Bob Linney, Dunvegan’s resident expert on trains. And he was of the opinion that the CP train in the frame was indeed taken in front of the Maxville station. However, it was photographed in the early 1990s… not the 1950s. The clue is the engine number: 1201. The train in the photo was pulling an excursion organized by the Bytown Railway Society that did a round-trip visit to the Highland Games. By the look of the station (abandoned), the picture was probably taken just before the station was torn down in the early 1990s.
As for the engine (Canadian Pacific Railway’s #1201, the last steam locomotive built by CPR), it was constructed in the CPR’s Angus shops in Montreal in June 1944. Today, old #1201 is the largest artifact in the Canadian Museum of Science and Technology’s collection. The museum (now rebranded “Ingenium”) acquired the locomotive in 1967. Why you ask was the museum renamed Ingenium? Who knows? The product of a very woke agency, from Quebec no doubt, it sounds vaguely like the room next to the mythical Roman vomitorium. What, pray tell, is so wrong with naming a public attraction in a way that clearly describes its function? This place could be selling genies in a bottle.
Seeing the photo of Maxville’s former railway station (which he and I believe was at the south end of King Street) brought back a flood of memories for Ken. “There was probably no other edifice in the village with so many memories attached, both fond and sad,” he wrote in one of his recent emails. He still vividly recalls the troop trains eastbound for Halifax during WWII, and prisoner-of-war trains westbound on the way to the camps.
The railway quite literally made the town of Maxville. The place doesn’t even exist on the 1879 Belden Historical Atlas, i.e., before the railway came to town. And for nearly seventy years, the train station was Maxville’s hub. When the mail arrived by train, I’m told Gordie Stewart would transport the mailbags to the post office (then located on the northeast corner of Main and Mechanic Street East) in a wheelbarrow.
And Ken reminisced that up until the early 50s at least, passenger trains were very much in demand. “The Sunday night westbound train may have had empty seats when it reached Maxville,” Ken told me, “but by the time it hit Moose Creek, and certainly Casselman, it was standing room only.” While taking RCMP training in Rockcliffe in the fall of 1952, he used to ride that train when he headed home on a one-day Sunday pass.
Even the sight of the station’s freight shed door in another photo I showed Ken brought a lump to his throat. “It was there, when I was 11 years old, that I picked my wee border collie, the smartest dog that ever lived.” The dog had been shipped by rail in half an orange crate from Oxford Station near Kemptville.
Just as in Maxville, the railway station in Greenfield was Dunvegan’s and Skye’s ticket to the outside world. Nothing remains of the station today, except for a dead-end lane just north of the tracks named Station Street. I’ve never even seen a photo of the Greenfield station, although I hope to cast my eyeballs over one soon. The Glengarry County Archives has one in its collection and it’s on my list for my next visit.
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