(died 26 or 27 June 1887, aged 60 years, 6 months), hotel keeper. He was a hotel keeper over many years at Lancaster (i. e., New Lancaster, or Lancaster Depot, now known simply as Lancaster, not the present South Lancaster). He was perhaps a hotel keeper at that location as early as the 1850s, and he remained a hotel keeper there till his death or not long before that event in the 1880s. He was in business there during the boom period of Lancaster, when that village provided essential and much-used railway services for a considerable part of GC (see the entry for Donald McNaughton).
McRae’s hotel is often mentioned in contemporary sources as a lodging place and as providing a place for the meetings of local organizations (such as the Caledonian Society) and for local events of every kind (such as the mortgage sales of Lochiel and Charlottenburgh land which were advertised to be held there 17 April 1882– The Glengarry Times 25 March 1882). The book of the Cornwall 1906 Old Boys’ Re-Union describes in glowing terms the amenities of the “McRae Hotel, Lancaster” (operated by that time by the father-and-son combination of George T. and Garnet G. Wood), and states that it “was built about 35 years ago by the late Evander McRae.” When John D. Ross was preparing generously to contribute to the costs of building the Lancaster Public Library, he protested that the planners of the library intended to include a hotel in it, which would injure Ross’s sister, who was at that time maintaining a commercial hall as part of the McRae Hotel. Damaged in a fire in 1932, the McRae Hotel building was destroyed by a further fire in 1935. He was probably the Evander McRae of Lot 21 in the 3rd Concession of Lancaster Township who was listed as a tanner in the 1851 census, and he was probably the man of that name who is believed to have been the owner of a somewhat primitive grist, carding and saw mill combination operating on Lot 23 of that concesssion in the 1870s and 1880s.
The journalist Alexander Mackenzie, who visited GC in 1879, wrote that on arriving at the “thriving village” of Lancaster, “I at once made for the principal hotel, kept, as I was informed in Montreal, by an excellent Gaelic-speaking Highlander, and a Macrae, whose father, in 1806, emigrated from Kintail. I saluted my host in my native Gaelic, to which he responded in pure Kintail vernacular; for one of the peculiarities you meet with throughout the whole Dominion, is to find the children and even the grandchildren of the original settlers speaking the dialect of their respective districts in Scotland; so that you meet with half-a-dozen or more different dialects in the same village or township. Any one acquainted with the various districts in the Scottish Highlands can therefore almost at once tell what part of the country the ancestors of the parties he is addressing originally came from. I was at once made quite at home, after my host had insisted upon carrying out the good old practice of his Scottish ancestors, by reminding me ‘gur luaithe deoch na sgiala,’ and at once, suiting the action to the word, offering me a ‘druthag’ out of his private bottle.”
When Kenneth Macdonald, following in Mackenzie’s footsteps, visited GC in 1882, he found that “Mr Macrae as a host is all that he was in 1879,” i. e., at the time of the Mackenzie visit, but that “since that time he has lost his eldest son, him to whom he looked to be the stay of his old age, and the light of the father’s life seems to have gone out when his son was taken from him.” The son who is mentioned here, Laughlin McRae, died aged 24. (death noticed, Cornwall Freeholder 7 Jan. 1881) Evander McRae was a Presbyterian. He died at Lancaster.
His death remembered, DTL Standard Freeholder 30 June 1944, based on Cornwall Freeholder 1 July 1887 * Lovell 1857 392 (old or new Lancaster?) * Woodburn 190 * cf Fraser, Gravestones, II, 243 & 287 * Ross, Lancaster, 119, 210, 212, 323, 327 * Ménard 30-31, 45 * Elliott 229 * Old Boys 1906 [146] * Mackenzie in The Celtic Magazine, V (1880) 155 * Macdonald in The Celtic Magazine, VIII (1883) 111 * Eileen Fourney, “The Founding of the Village of Lancaster,” Glengarry News 13 June 1984 * Archives of Ontario-SC (microfilm), Register J, pp. 222-225 (his will) * assaulted by drunkards, Glengarry Times 15 April 1882 * son Herbert Evander McRae dies, CF 8 July 1931 * political meeting at McRae’s hall, Lancaster, Cornwall Standard 17 Feb. 1887 * hotel fire damage, GN 24 June 1932 * photographs of McRae hotel, 1935 fire scene, GN 3 & 30 Jan. 2002