family, of general merchants at Martintown, GC. In 1827, a man called MacPhadden bought a Martintown stone building known as “Grant’s Folly,” which contained a general store, post office and living quarters. Presumably he operated the general store that was in the building (the post office proprietorship went elsewhere); in any case, his son, Charles, was a general merchant in the building for many years. Rhodes Grant describes Charles MacPhadden’s store as “large and busy.” Charles MacPhadden was involved in bringing the telegraph to Martintown in the 1870s. Charles’s daughter Minnie was married to Dr Donald G. McLennan, and another daughter, Miss Annie MacPhadden, operated the store after her father till she died in 1941. Thereafter, her nephew John C. MacPhadden (Jackie MacPhadden) operated the store till his death in 1971, after which his wife Eleanor operated it for a few years. In the first volume (1974) of his history of Martintown Rhodes Grant noted that the MacPhadden store, which he believed “must be easily one of the oldest businesses in Canada,” had been under the management of one family from 1827 till 1972, which was his date of writing. In his second volume (1976) he noted that the store, once thriving and valued by the people for miles around, was now closed. See also the entries for D. T. Cresswell and A. R. Foulds, Martintown merchants. Charles the storekeeper of the present article was presumably the Charles McPhadden who began a cheese factory at Martintown in 1870, one of the first cheese factories in GC.
A 1914 biographical collection dealing with British Columbia contains a detailed and lively sketch of the life of Donald McPhaden (spelled thus), who was born in GC 16 Nov. 1847, the son of Alexander and Anna McPhaden. “for about seven years, while he was also going to school, [he] contributed to his own support by working in the general store conducted by his brother in Martintown, Glengarry county.” Donald McPhaden was a gold prospector, merchant, hotel keeper, alderman and pioneer in British Columbia.
Rhodes Grant, i, 73, 129, ii, 50-51 (also photos in both these vols.) * Ewan Ross, The Rosses of Martintown (1971) 33 * MacGillivray & Ross 409 * British Columbia from the Earliest Times to the Present: Biographical: Volume IV (Vancouver, &., 1914) 74-78 on Donald McFaden, with full page portrait