(27 April 1872-11 Dec. 1952), railway builder, soldier. (General Hervey; C. L. Hervey, C.E.) Born Paris, Illinois. Parents: Robert Glasford Hervey, of Maitland, Ont., and his wife Lucy Sawin, of Virginia. He was educated at Port Hope, at St. John’s Miliitary Academy (the location of the academy has not been identified) and at Rose Polytechnic, Terre Haute, Indiana. Hervey worked as an engineer building railways in the United States, Canada, and, in 1905-1907, in Cuba. He was associated with Donald Robert Mcdonald in contracts on the National Transcontinental Railway.

     In the years 1912 to 1914 he was the engineer in charge of building the Glengarry and Stormont Railway line from De Beaujeu station, near St-Polycarpe, Que., to Cornwall, Ont. In provincial and federal statutes incorporating the Glengarry and Stormont Railway Company, 1912 and 1913, the name of C. L. Hervey, Civil Engineer, heads the list of people who are to constitute the new company. Through rail other than its own east of St-Polycarpe, it connected Montreal with Cornwall. The new line, which ran through Lancaster and Charlottenburgh townships, was or soon became, financially at least, a project of the Sun Life Assurance Company, and was opened unofficially in the fall of 1914, and officially on 15 May 1915. The first through passenger train Montreal to Cornwall operated 20 March 1915. By the local people, the line was known, unsympathetically, as the Peanut Line, or the Peanut. Williamstown station, built 1915, was one of the five GC stations on the new line. In Jan. 1914 Hervey was reported to be promoting not only the Glengarry and Stormont Railway, but another railway which would cross GC and Prescott, linking Calumet (Que.), Hawkesbury, Vankleek Hill, Alexandria, Martintown and Cornwall. (Glengarry News 2 Jan. 1914 ) He and the directors of the Glengarry and Stormont Railway were honoured by being given a luncheon at Williamstown in Nov. 1914, on the completion of the line from the St-Polycarpe area to Cornwall. (GN 4 Dec. 1914)

     Hervey’s original training had been in part military, and he had served his country of birth as a sergeant, 1898-1899, in the Spanish-American War. In the Canadian Army in World War I he saw active service overseas, rising to the rank of brigadier general. He was awarded the DSO, and mentioned three times in dispatches.

     He twice ran for MP in the Glengarry-Stormont constituency. In the federal by-election of 27 Oct. 1919, entering the campaign late, he ran as an Independent Conservative against J.W. Kennedy, the candidate of the United Farmers of Ontario (UFO), who was elected. In a campaign statement, Hervey stated, “I built the Glengarry-Stormont railway before the war and was actively engaged in the establishment of industries in these counties when, unfortunately, my activities were interrupted by the war, in which I served in France until April 1919.” (Glengarry News 17 Oct. 1919 ) The Farmers’ Sun, which was once the newspaper of the Patrons of Industry and was now the organ of the UFO, at this stage seldom noticed GC affairs, but it rediscovered the county (5 Nov. 1919) with a bitter retrospect on the campaign: “In Glengarry, General Hervey studiously avoided the Unionist label as if it were a plague and posed as an [I]ndependent Conservative. He received quite strong backing in the towns, which included the support of many Liberals, irate at the enforced absence of a candidate of their own. Every effort was made to stir up feeling in the towns and villages against the farmers, and Cornwall, which is normally Liberal, gave the Independent Conservative 1,400 odd majority. But Mr. Kennedy had a comfortable majority of at least 1,600, and if he lives up to his reputation, ought to be an acquisition to the House.” At this distance of time, and given the long-standing Ontario practice of generally excluding from print any notice of anti-farmer feeling among the townsfolk, it is hard to guess what degree of truth there may have been in this harsh, uncompromising charge of anti-farmer bias. At any rate, whether the urbanites were incited against the farmers of not, Harkness comments that the poll results showed a rural versus urban split. Morover, with regard to anti-farmer feeling at this time generally rather than in any particular constituency, it may be mentioned that O. D. Skelton (who had Cornwall connections; see W. C. Clark) about the beginning of 1919 had written in a private letter that “I have been astounded by the violence of anti-farmer sentiment even among educated city people.” So much had public opinion been affected by the wartime turmoil and tensions.

     In the federal general election of 6 Dec. 1921 Hervey was the Conservative candidate, running against J.W. Kennedy, who was the Progressive candidate and who was elected, and J.E. Chevrier, of Cornwall, the Liberal candidate.

     General Hervey died at Sunnybrook Hospital, Toronto. (four children) He was buried at Maitland, Ont. Anglican. He was married 4 July 1907 to Edith Margaret Gibson, of New Brunswick. Her sister was married in 1915 to Col. D. M. Robertson. In 1921, Hervey was a Lancaster Township resident, and earlier, for some years, he had lived near Williamstown. Hervey’s work in railway building in GC marked the end (some six decades after the process began) of railway development in the county. Thereafter, the rule for the system was contraction, not expansion. By a strange matching of events, at the very time when the great race of Glengarry-born railway builders was dying off elsewhere in Canada and the U. S., an engineer with only limited preceding involvement with GC came into the county to be a railway builder there, and even began the process of “naturalizing” himself as a Glengarrian.

Globe & Mail 13 Dec. 1952 (classified notice) and Glengarry News 19 Dec. 1952 (portrait) * biog. entry in Prominent People of the Province of Quebec 1923-24 (1924?) [unpaginated] * Who’s Who and Why 1921 pp. 947-948 (portrait) * Ross, Lancaster, 281 * Harkness 317, 318 * MacGillivray & Ross 155 * Williamstown 200 45 * “statutes incorporating”: Ontario (1912): 2 Geo. V chap. 134; Canada (1913): 3-4 George V chap. 118 * through train, GN 2 April 1915 * Hervey’s pension application file (C-2.290.731), Dept. of Veterans Affairs, Washington, D. C. * on current state of abandoned Peanut rail line, GN 18 Sept. 1997 * Skelton: Robert Craig Brown & Ramsay Cook, Canada 1896-1921: a Nation Transformed (1981) 320, 395