McGill and its Story, 1821-1921. Cyrus Macmillan

life after the granting of the Constitutional Act by the Home Government in 1791. He was selected, with J. B. Durocher as his colleague, to represent the West Ward of Montreal in the first parliament of Lower Canada which met on the 17th of December, 1792. Later he became a member of the Legislative Council, and in 1812 he was appointed one of the commissioners for removing from the city the old walls which had been built in 1724. He took a prominent part in the Militia organisation; during the war of 1812 he was honorary Colonel of the Montreal Infantry Volunteer Regiment; later and before hostilities ended, although he was too old for active service, he was promoted to be Brigadier General, and he seems to have had a large part in directing the administration of the various Militia units. After a busy, active and strenuous life of unselfish service for his community and of devoted efforts for the promotion of tolerance and harmony between races and creeds as the one sure foundation for a united Canadian nationality, he died in Montreal on December 19th, 1813, at the age of sixty-nine, and was buried on December 21st. The official record of his death reads: “On the nineteenth day of December, one thousand eight hundred and thirteen, the Honourable James McGill, Colonel, Commandant of the Montreal Militia, died, and was buried on the twenty-first following.” The certificate of death was signed by his partner, Isaac Todd, and by Thomas Blackwood, a native of Lanarkshire, Scotland, who was at one time employed in the firm of McGill and Todd, and who later formed a business partnership with Francis Desrivières.

Thomas Pattendel

P. Canot Sculpsit

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      Montreal as James McGill knew it

      Mrs. James McGill survived her husband less than five years. She died in Montreal on the 16th of April, 1818, aged seventy years and nine months, and was buried on the 18th following. There were no children from the marriage.

      James McGill was born of Scotch Presbyterian parents and he grew up in the church and religion of his fathers. When he settled in Montreal there was no Church of Scotland in the city. The first Presbyterian congregation in Montreal consisted of a small group of Scottish settlers. It was organised without a church building in 1786 by the Rev. John Bethune, who ministered to its members from March 12th in that year until he moved to Upper Canada in May, 1787. But it was but a temporary organisation and had no continuous status. From 1787 to 1790 there is no record of the holding of a strictly Presbyterian service in the city. The only Protestant body holding service regularly was known as “the Protestant Congregation of Montreal,” the pastor of which was the Rev. David Charbrand Delisle, one of the three clergymen who had been employed by the Church of England to labour among the French-Canadians. He was Rector of the Parish of Montreal and Chaplain of the Garrison. This congregation worshipped until 1789 in the Church of the Recollet Fathers, which with great tolerance and courtesy was for twenty years at their disposal; in 1789 they were given the Chapel belonging to the Jesuits' College, then Government property; they opened it for public worship in December under the name of Christ Church.

      Like all the young Protestant Scotchmen living in Montreal at that time, James McGill became by necessity a member of the Protestant Episcopal Congregation. The adherents to the two Protestant creeds were tolerant and harmonious in their relations one with the other and they were content to worship together. In 1789 when the Bishop of Nova Scotia visited Montreal an address was presented to him by the Church Wardens, and by “a committee of the Protestant inhabitants of Montreal,” irrespective of their former creed. The majority of the latter were Scotch Presbyterians. The Bishop was met at Pointe aux Trembles by the reception committee. One of the “Protestant inhabitants” who signed and presented the address was James McGill. There is no doubt that the larger number of this “committee of Protestant inhabitants,” at that time identified with the Protestant Episcopal Congregation of Montreal, returned to the Church of their fathers as soon as a Church was built, several of them becoming office-bearers. The precise action taken by James McGill is uncertain. He seems to have divided his allegiance between the two communions; while not severing his connection entirely with the Church of England he gave his support to the establishment of a Church of Scotland and later became identified with it. When the St. Gabriel Street Church, the first Presbyterian Church in Montreal, was built in 1792, he subscribed ten guineas towards the construction of the building. He signed the call to the first pastor of the Church, the Rev. James Somerville; he thereafter contributed three pounds a year to his stipend and occupied pew No. 16 in the Church. His brother Andrew later contributed five pounds towards removing the remaining debt from the building. The Rev. Mr. Somerville, the pastor of the Church, officiated at Andrew's funeral. There is little doubt from the records that James McGill regarded himself as of the Church of Scotland although he was for a time, in those days of somewhat surprising religious harmony and tolerance, a member of the Protestant Episcopal Church of Montreal.

      One of James McGill's most intimate friends and confidants in Canada was the Rev. John Strachan, afterwards the Right Reverend Bishop of Toronto, who was thirty-four years his junior. He was a native of Aberdeen, Scotland. He received his M. A. from King's College, Aberdeen, in 1797, and then attended for some months Divinity Classes at St. Andrew's University, near which he had a post as a Parish schoolmaster. Towards the end of 1797, he came to Canada by invitation to organise a seminary of learning in Upper Canada, but the plan was abandoned and he became tutor in a private family in Kingston, Ontario. He offered himself as a candidate for the pastorship of the St. Gabriel Street Presbyterian Church on September 21, 1802, but before his letter was received another applicant, the Rev. James Somerville, had been accepted. Later he took orders in the Anglican Church and was appointed to the Church at Cornwall. He opened there a school and his fame as a teacher was soon widespread. Among his pupils were the three sons of the Rev. John Bethune who had established the first Presbyterian Congregation in Montreal, one of whom afterwards became Rector of Christ Church and acting-Principal of McGill University. In 1807, he married the widow of James McGill's younger brother, Andrew, formerly Miss Wood of Cornwall, and he was thus brought into closer relationship with the McGill family. His enthusiasm for education and for its advancement in Canada was unbounded and it is evident that he impressed his ideas as to ways and means and methods on the mind of his wealthy merchant friend. James McGill was a believer in the value of education; he knew what it had done for his own home-land, and what Scotland, educationally, was doing for the world. He determined that the torch which for him had been lighted in Glasgow University should burn likewise for those who would succeed him in the land of his adoption. He had indicated that determination during the consideration of the subject in the Legislature. But on the question of method he sought advice from his young teacher friend, Strachan, whom he frequently visited in the latter's home in Cornwall. During these Glengarry visits there was many a happy and roseate night of mingled sociability and high seriousness, after the custom of their race and time, when the two friends, the young educationalist and the older man of wealth, with similar vision, sat late in discussion of the Canadian educational problem and of plans for its solution.

      In a letter to the other surviving executors of James McGill's will, written from York [Toronto] on May 31, 1820, seven years after James McGill's death, the Rev. Dr. Strachan gave interesting information on these discussions and their bearing on the circumstances leading up to the practical working out of James McGill's dreams on education as evidenced later in his will. He wrote: “It was, I believe, at Cornwall during one of the visits which Mr. McGill made to Mrs. Strachan and me that his final resolution respecting the erection of a College after his name, endowing it, etc., was taken. We had been speaking of several persons who had died in Lower Canada and had left no memorial of themselves to benefit the country in which they had realised great fortunes. And particularly I mentioned a University, as the English had no Seminary where an Academical Education could be obtained. We had repeated conversations upon the subject, and he departed determined to do something and with some inclination to leave twenty instead of ten thousand pounds, together with Burnside, and even to make some preparations before his death, expressing at the same time a wish that if he did anything I should take an active part in the proposed College.”

      It was