(1818?-24 Sept.1893), clergyman. (at least in earlier years known as Red John Fraser, Red Fraser) Born in Ferintosh, Black Isle, Scotland. Parents: John Fraser, a bank agent in Inverness, Scotland, and his wife Helen Grant. John Fraser is believed to have graduated from King’s College, Aberdeen, though it has not been possible to isolate his name among the various John Frasers in the college records. He appears in his Canadian years to have impressed people with his knowledge of the Scriptures and the classics. He had also studied botany and astronomy, and lectured on them while a minister in Ontario. He came to Canada in 1845 as a missionary of the Free Church of Scotland. His first Canadian charge was at Melbourne, Que. Afterwards he served in Ontario at Cornwall (with duties also at Martintown), St. Thomas, Thamesford (1859-1866), Kincardine, and Indian Lands, GC. There is said to have been some hesitation about accepting him as the minister of Indian Lands because he had left the Kincardine charge on account of ill health.

     John Fraser was minister of the Gordon Church, Indian Lands, from 1878 to 23 Feb. 1887. This was the church where Ralph Connor’s father, the Rev. Daniel Gordon, had preached a few years earlier. At the time of the Rev. John Fraser’s ministry, the church had not yet been made famous by the novels of Ralph Connor (Rev. Charles W. Gordon). The little settlement at the Gordon Church was given a post office in 1880 with the name of St. Elmo. The name, surprising in a Presbyterian community, is said to have been chosen by one of the Rev. John Fraser’s daughters (it is not known which one) who had been reading the novel St. Elmo (1866) by the American writer Augusta J. Evans. More than a dozen years later, in 1894, the novel St. Elmo, evidently still popular, was one of the books being sold at the bookstore Samuel I. Jones operated along with his Review newspaper at Vankleek Hill. The Rev. Donald MacMillan has noted the connection of the natural phenomenon called “St. Elmo’s fire” with the Biblical “tongues of living flame” and the spiritual awakening in the Gordon chuch congregation during the Great Revival and afterwards. (Kirk 188; Acts 2:3; cf. the title of Connor’s novel of the Great Revival, Torches through the Bush) Today the St. Elmo post office has gone, but St. Elmo remains the name for the location of the Gordon Church and for the wider rural community around the church. Moreover, it was during John Fraser’s ministry at the Gordon Church that the village of Maxville formed around the railway station established two miles south of the Gordon Church by the newly built Canada Atlantic Railway and that the older village of Dominionville, south of Maxville, was eclipsed and fell into decline.

     John Fraser was one of the two ministers from outside the congregation who assisted the resident minister at the formal opening of the Kenyon Presbyterian Church at Dunvegan on 9 Sept. 1880. During his pastorate of the Gordon Church he revisited Scotland at least once. When John Fraser left the Gordon Church the large pastorate he had served was divided, with the Maxville and Dominionville congregations becoming independent and self-supporting. John Fraser died in Montreal. His obituary stated, “After his retirement from the active duties of the ministry about seven years ago, the reverend gentleman travelled extensively east and west, preaching in vacant charges, and studying the state of spiritual life in different sections of the country. His impressions were that the people are losing the firm hold of God’s Word that they had a generation ago, and he accounted for this by a belief that the teaching of many itinerant evangelists is very superficial.” The obituary also said, “He was of a retiring, gentle disposition, and his whole life was far removed from the reproach of self-seeking.” W. A. MacKay, in an eloquent character sketch of Fraser, said that Fraser was “equally at home” in both English and Gaelic, and had well mastered the notoriously difficult written form of Gaelic.

     An address of Fraser’s delivered at Montreal in 1868 against the introduction of organ music to Presbyterian church services was published in pamphlet form, and extracts from it are reprinted by MacKay. Also, though the identification is far from certain, Fraser is said to have written the words of “A Christmas Anthem” which was published with music by C. R. Sinclair in The Canada Presbyterian 16 Dec. 1885. For John Fraser, see also James Drummond.

     John Fraser was married to Charlotte Augusta MacKie (d. 28 Jan. 1903). (seven children) They were the parents of Dr Wilhelmina Grant Fraser Stait. Another daughter, Charlotte, appears to have been sub-editor of the Montreal Star.

Obituary (undated clipping, perhaps Witness), includes fine hand-drawn portrait * Whyte, ii, 95, 224 * W. A. MacKay, Pioneer Life in Zorra (1899), chapter XX: on his ministry at Thamesford (portrait) * Rev. G. Watt Smith, “Diamond Jubilee of Gordon Church, St. Elmo, Ontario,” in E. Blair and Ewan Ross, The Gordon Church, St. Elmo and the Inscriptions on Its Tombstones (1972) (Smith article first published Glengarry News 2 May 1924 * MacMillan, Kirk: index (portrait) * MacMillan, Kenyon Presbyterian Church 10 * information kindly provide by University of Aberdeen * St: Elmo name: Maxville (1967) 34; MacGillivray & Ross 331, 334, 338; Bibliography of Glengarry 11; advert. for “Review Book Store,” Vankleek Hill Review 23 Feb. 1894 * anthem: Bibliography of Glengarry 16, Sinclair 22 * elected president, Sunday school organization in connection with the Presbytery of Glengarry, Cornwall Reporter 15 Oct. 1881 (report on Sunday School Convention “held at Indian Lands”)