(died 8 Dec. 1922 aged 70), farmer, character and figure of legend. (Wild Willie Denovan) His mother’s name was Rachel MacIntosh. Wild Willie Denovan, as he was commonly called, was widely known in the GC area in his time as a colourful man, of violent speech and eccentric life. Possibly he was exhibiting the verbal violence known clinically as “Tourette’s Syndrome.” But possibly also, realizing that he had a talent for being himself, he lived up to the character he had invented. As with one of his predecessors, Allan Gorrach MacRae, children found him frightening. For adults, it was a different matter, and an old lady remembers that her father loved to visit at Willie’s house and did not mind his lurid vocabulary (talking “nasty”) and “terrible sayings.” The report survives in another source that Wild Willie lived in the front of the small farm house and his parents lived in the back of it, and “they didn’t talk–just notes slipped under the door when the old couple needed groceries or whatever.” Wild Willie was described vividly by the journalist Austin F. Cross in a passage published first in the Ottawa Citizen and afterwards in Austin F. Cross’s Cross Roads (1936). Cross wrote, “If I could call back from the grave people I knew and liked and who have passed on, Wild Willie would be near the very top of my list.” Wild Willie Denovan is remembered to have kept bees and sold honey. He died at his residence, Lot 14, 7th concession of Lochiel, near Dalkeith. He was unmarried. An uncertain recollection suggests that he was a shantyman in his earlier days. It was a feature of the older GC life that the Glengarrians were highly and even indulgently tolerant of eccentric and “odd” men, but seem to have had little tolerance for women of these categories.

     Austin F. Cross (1898-1961), born at Oshawa, Ont., was a well-known Ottawa journalist who had Vankleek Hill and Dalkeith family connections. He called GC “the grandest and most famous county in Canada.” He was the Ottawa Citizen reporter for Mackenzie King’s visit to Maxville Fair, Sept. 1945.

Cornwall Standard 21 Dec. 1922 * William Denovan gravestone behind the church at West Church, Kirk Hill * private information * Austin F. Cross: MDict 185; Cross Roads, esp. essay “Sleigh through Glengarry”; Maxville (1991) 287