(15 June 1836-14 Feb. 1908), author. (C. Thomas) Born in Troy, N.Y. When he was two years old, his parents took him to Quebec province, where his father had formerly lived. Cyrus Thomas was a school teacher in New York State, Vermont, and Quebec province including the Eastern Townships, before turning to professional authorship when his health proved too precarious for teaching. He was not a Glengarrian, but his books include one which students of GC must take into account, namely his History of the Counties of Argenteuil, Que., and Prescott, Ont., from the Earliest Settlement to the Present (1896). This 670-page history, which is rich in information on economic life as well as biographical data, contains many references to individual Glengarrians, with some notices of that part of the “Greater Glengarry” which extends into Prescott County’s Caledonia Township, and is valuable as a report on two counties sharing some conditions with GC and from a time when we do not have a similar history of GC. (Its abbreviation in the present dictionary: Thomas.) The linking of two counties in different provinces and on opposite sides of a major river was not incongruous, because they had long shared important ties, economic and otherwise, with strong connections beyond the late 20th century running down from Lachute and Brownsburg as far south as northern GC. The Vankleek Hill newspaper recorded Thomas visiting the Vankleek Hill area in 1894 to gather information and canvass for subscribers, and again to make deliveries of the published volume. Through the same paper a little later he was issuing reminders to purchasers who had not yet made their payments. Cyrus Thomas died at Richford, Vermont. Baptist. Married. The history was reprinted in facsimile by the Mika Publishing Company in 1981 and by Agincourt Publications of Agincourt, Ont., in 1983.
Thomas Tweed Higginson, the diarist of the Vankleek Hill-Hawkesbury area, in April 1896 sent “Mr. Thomas of Carillon” some information about participants in the War of 1812. And a few months later, on 27 Aug., Thomas called on Higginson and gave him a copy of the Argenteuil and Prescott history, for which he paid Thomas $2.50. Higginson recorded that the book was large, on good paper, “very well got up,” and that Thomas “has 1800 copies.” Playfully, “Sandy Fraser” (J. E. McIntosh), who knew Thomas’ book, mentioned him in 1947 as “an auld chap from the States”–recapturing, perhaps, how the Prescott people saw him. (Farmer's Advocate 26 June 1947) Julia Grace Wales in 1957 termed Thomas’ history “that valuable and now very rare book,” and reported praises of the “excellent teaching” in a “private school” which Thomas and his wife and daughter conducted at Carillon, Quebec, across the Ottawa River from Pointe-Fortune.
He has to be distinguished from his American contemporary and namesake, Cyrus Thomas (1825-1910), scientist, archaeologist, and distinguished student of Indian mounds.
Life in MDict (but not in Dictionary of Canadian Biography) * Morgan (1898) 1005-6 * advert. for Agincourt reprint, Vankleek Hill Review 23 Feb. 1983 * VKHR 7 Dec. 1894, 10 May (two refs.) & 7 June 1895, 18 Sept. & 18 Dec. 1896 * Diaries of Thomas Tweed Higginson, ed. Thomas Boyd Higginson (1960) 76, 78 * Julia Grace Wales as per notes to Thomson (E. W.) * Cyrus Thomas the archaeologist: The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, ed. J. S. Bowman (1995) 727 & other sources * story, with much detail, of how copy of 1st edition of the history was restored and handbound and presented to Les Amis de la maison Macdonell-Williamson, VKHR 12 June 1996