(23 Aug. 1863-24 June 1948), newspaperman, soldier. (Col. A. G. F. Macdonald, George Sandfield, the Colonel) Born in Alexandria, GC. Parents: Donald A. Macdonald, who was later lieut. governor of Ontario, and his wife Catherine Grant Fraser, who was the daughter of Col. Alexander Fraser of Fraserfield. When A. G. F. Macdonald was a child, his uncle John Sandfield Macdonald was premier of the province of Canada and the first premier of Ontario. And D. A. Macdonald was himself, of course, a major figure in Alexandria and had a distinguished career in national politics. Throughout life, A. G. F. Macdonald, who had grown up in the shadow of the mighty “Sandfield” brothers, was himself commonly known as “George Sandfield.” He was educated at the boys’ separate school in Alexandria, at Upper Canada College, and at Loyola College in Montreal. On 15 April 1890, he married Eugenie Hubert of Montreal. Her father René Auguste Richard Hubert was prothonotary of Montreal and was a first cousin of Sir George Étiennne Cartier. She was French-speaking, and was perhaps not completely fluent in English when she arrived in Alexandria. After the marriage, A. G. F. Macdonald, who had been working in a bank in Montreal, and his new wife settled in Alexandria, where he was to look after his father’s business interests.
The GC-area Liberals founded the Glengarry News as their party paper (first issue 4 Feb. 1892). A few months after the first issue, A. G. F. Macdonald became its editor. He remained editor and publisher into the 1940s. Altogether, he and his son Eugene Macdonald between them operated the Glengarry News for nearly a century (1892-1988). Today, after more than a century of being the newspaper of record of GC, the Glengarry News, which has always been a weekly, and always a local newspaper of exceptional distinction and competence, is still owned by the Sandfield Macdonalds.
In 1913, A. G. F. Macdonald bought the rival Alexandria newspaper, the Glengarrian, which thereupon ceased to be published, though part of its files have, to the benefit of historians, been preserved along with those of the Glengarry News in Alexandria. However, Alexandria did not remain a single-newspaper town for long, for J. A. Laurin’s Alexandria Times began publication in 1915 (it lasted until 1955). The Glengarry News, as a small town paper in eastern Ontario, was necessarily a very small business, and according to his son Eugene Macdonald, A. G. F. Macdonald sometimes had to use family money to maintain the operation of the Glengarry News during the hard years of the Depression of the 1930s, when GC and Alexandria were both so badly hit. Two of the long-term Glengarry News employees, J. George Sabourin and J. L. O. Sabourin are separately noticed in this dictionary.
Deeply interested in military matters, and with an acute sense of civic obligation, A. G. F. Macdonald had a long and distinguished career in the area militia. He became a 2nd lieut. in the 59th Stormont and Glengarry Regiment in 1897. During the Boer War he was sent as a company commander with the 3rd Special Service Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment, to Halifax, where it was to serve as a replacement for a British unit which was sent to active service in the war. He was the commanding officer of the 59th from 1910 to 1920. In 1913, he was one of the militia officers who accompanied Sam Hughes the militia minister to Britain and Europe as military observers. In WWI, he took a leading part in raising the 154th Battalion, CEF, in the GC area. As its commanding officer, he took the 154th overseas. There, however, after further training, instead of proceeding as a unit to combat, the 154th was broken up to provide personnel for other units. While A. G. F. Macdonald was in England, his son Lt George Fraser Macdonald (13 Sept. 1894-20 Nov. 1916), known as Fraser, was killed in action on the Somme. His death was noticed in the London Times of 11 Dec. 1916 (repr. CF 4 Jan. 1917). In his memory, Mr and Mrs A. G. F. Macdonald donated the one acre of land on which the Alexandria war memorial, standing prominently on its hillside at the north side of the town, was built in the early 1920s.
A. G. F. Macdonald was honorary lieutenant colonel (later honorary colonel) of the SDG Highlanders from 1925 to 1948. He was a leading figure in having the Armoury built in Alexandria in 1913–one of the town’s principal buildings. The Alexandria legion branch is named after him the Col. A. G. F. Macdonald Memorial Branch. (Glengarry News 14 June 1962)
Besides operating his newspaper, A. G. F. Macdonald administered family properties in Alexandria. The fierce Dr D. D. Macdonald, in his denunciation (GN 4 May 1917) of the car traffic on Alexandria’s Main Street, thought that it should be redirected to Bishop Street, from where the drifting dust thus created would be sent “into Colonel A. G. F. Macdonald’s fields, where it will do little harm.” As Alexandria has slowly developed, the newspaper over the years has occasionally noted the sale, for development of various kinds, of portions of the family lands in Alexandria. It seems unlikely, on the basis of any evidence that entered the public domain, that Macdonald was ever in any sense a wealthy man, or had a better income than some of the more ambitious merchants of the town. In Alexandria, A. G. F. Macdonald and his family lived at “Garry Fen,” which was the “Sandfield” family home, formerly the home of his father and in a sense the manor house of Alexandria, situated on Mill Square in the busy centre of the town. The Glengarry News office, on Main Street, was a few hundred feet away, and on the opposite side of Mill Square. This was the location of the office from 1897, in a building which A. G. F. Macdonald caused to be erected in that year (GN 4 June 1897); in the first few years the newspaper office been a block or two further north on Main Street.
His wife, who was born in 1865, died on 26 Sept. 1934. (obituary GN 5 Oct. 1934 ) (eleven children) He himself died at Cartierville, Que. Col. Macdonald and his wife are buried at St. Finnan’s cemetery, Alexandria.
Among honours, he received the Colonial Auxiliary Forces medal in 1925 and the Coronation medal in 1937. (GN 25 Dec. 1925, 29 Oct. 1937) He served as president of the Canadian Press Association at least once, in 1901. (GN 28 March 1901, 28 Feb. 1902)
A. G. F. Macdonald rarely published editorials in the Glengarry News. Nor, except in rare cases, did he otherwise write there under his own name. Nevertheless, given the small staff the paper had, it must be supposed that much that appeared there was written by him, or was reshaped by his hand. He must therefore necessarily be considered one of the people who had a major role in their time of fashioning Glengarrians’ image of themselves. This was the age of splendidly-detailed and often vivid obituaries. Some of them were in their own right tiny histories of Glengarry life. Many of these must have been put together substantially by Macdonald. Even those he reprinted from out-of-town papers usually had a Glengarry “stamp” added in the form of a note on the local relatives of the deceased–a note which, we may suspect, often drew on Macdonald’s genealogical knowledge. The Glengarry News had a job-printing side. Thus it occasionally issued local histories or other local publications. But Macdonald wrote no books or pamphlets of his own. Here and there, however, especially in the obituaries, a brilliant phrase flashes in the old files of the Glengarry News. For a few words, or a line or two, journalism becomes literature. How often was this the contribution of the Colonel?
Later, his son Eugene used the newspaper to express his views on a very wide range of subjects, through editorials and otherwise, and he impressed his distinctive personality very strongly on the paper. In A. G. F. Macdonald’s day, by contrast, very few readers of the Glengarry News, though they knew Macdonald was a Roman Catholic and a Liberal, had otherwise any occasion to know what the Colonel thought about most matters, or what he was like as an individual. As to his personality, so far as the newspaper provided any evidence, the reader would be left to assume that A. G. F. Macdonald was austere and rather colourless. But the reflective reader might well conclude that that too was something for which he had, in truth, not been provided with enough evidence to form a verdict.
The Macdonald family were Roman Catholics, and the newspaper was published in a predominantly Roman Catholic town. Especially in its first 30 years or so, the Glengarry News published long, loving, detailed reports on Roman Catholic religious events. These must often have fascinated Protestant readers. Certainly, years later many of these articles make great reading. Nevertheless, Protestant readers seem always to have felt that the paper was scrupulously fair in its treatment of Protestants. There was no proselytization of any kind–and nobody expected there would be. Protestant news was always reported, and even the Orange Order (though admittedly, locally, it was hardly an active enemy of Rome) got due coverage. Eugene Macdonald has written movingly of how his father, in his later years, would conclude his working day by walking down to the cathedral “to meditate and make the Way of the Cross.” (Sandfields 54)
Though founded as a Liberal journal, the Glengarry News always avoided being abrasive; it was always a community newspaper. And in truth, it was founded at a time when customs in Eastern Ontario journalism were changing; the old, violent, sometimes irresponsible and disreputable partisanship was giving way to broader views. Perhaps, indeed, in being founded as a party journal it was founded on an idea that (although the founders did not realize it) was already by that time out of date. Very slowly, as the decades passed, the remaining partisanship faded from it, then after a period when its Liberalism reawoke only at election time, it was non-partisan from about the early 1950s. With time, the attitude of Eugene Macdonald to the parties became one of “a plague on both your houses.”
The death of A. G. F.’s 22-year-old son Lt George Fraser Macdonald in WWI has already been noted. Another son, Sgt Ian Bruce Macdonald (14 Jan. 1903-30 May 1944), known as Bruce, getting into middle age at the time of his death, died of a brain tumour in England while serving in the Canadian Army in WWII. He was married to Florence Gormley, daughter of Mrs Florence Mary Gormley. After the death of Sgt Macdonald, his widow was married to Dr J. W. Bernard Villeneuve. The Glengarry News of 16 Jan. 1942 has a long interesting letter from Bruce Macdonald describing his impressions of England and Scotland and mentioning the names of numerous GC-area servicemen he knew in Britain. (Such soldiers’ letters were a feature of the Glengarry News in the First World War–less so in the Second.) Bruce’s sister-in-law Genevieve Gormley was with him when he died in England. Another son of Col. A. G. F.’s, John Sandfield, known as Sandfield, was one of the first patients in the SDG TB Sanatorium (the “San”) which opened at Glen Walter in 1937, and he died 23 June 1941, aged 31, a victim of TB. One of A. G. F. Macdonald’s daughters, Beatrice, who died 8 April 1979, aged 78, was a nun, serving for more than 50 years in the Sacred Heart community. Another of A. G. F. Macdonald’s sons, Hubert Sandfield Macdonald (6 March 1899-8 Nov. 1981), a WWI veteran, made a career in the newsprint industry. When he retired in 1966, he was manager of the St. Lawrence Paper Co., in Trois-Rivières, Que. He was married to Ella Marguerite Dever (d. 18 Oct. 1975), the daughter of Edward J. Dever. The last surviving of A. G. F. Macdonald’s children, Ronald E. R. Macdonald, was (like Hubert) a resident of Maxville Manor in his last years, and died 19 Sept. 1990 at Cornwall General Hospital, aged 81. (his obituary, with portrait, GN 26 Sept. 1990)
A. G. F. Macdonald’s eldest son, Donald A. Macdonald, an Alexandria lawyer, and youngest son Eugene, the Colonel’s successor as editor of the Glengarry News, are separately noticed in this dictionary. A. G. F. Macdonald was the brother-in-law of Senator Hingston and the father-in-law of General Donald J. Macdonald, who are also noticed in this dictionary.
Glengarry News 25 June & 2 July 1948, Standard Freeholder (with editorial), 24,25, 28 June 1948 * GN Diamond Jubilee Special Supplement 8 Feb. 1952: valuable biog. material, esp. on his military career * Macdonald, Sandfields (has family portraits) * Scullion * Boss: various refs. (with portraits) * marries, CF & Glengarrian both 18 April 1890 * his will in SDG Surrogate Court records * recollected as schoolboy, A. W. McDougald’s hist. of GC, GN 29 Dec. 1933 * Angus H. McDonell’s recollections of the GN office about 1919, GN 11 Jan. 1973 * Ostrom 272-273, 303 * obituary of Miss Ella Macdonald, a long-term GN employee, GN 16 Jan. 1964 * returns from Hughes trip, and from U.K. 1917, GN 31 Oct. 1913, 27 July 1917 * war memorial site donated: GN 2 June 1922, 5 Oct. 1923; Boss 72 * death of son Lt George Fraser Macdonald, GN 24 Nov. & 1 Dec. 1916, also London Times as noted * illness, death of son Ian Bruce Macdonald, GN 12 May & 2 June 1944, SFH 2 June 1944 * death of son John Sandfield, GN 27 June 1941 * obituaries of son Hubert Sandfield Macdonald, & wife, GN 11 Nov. 1981, 23 Oct. 1975