(25 Aug. 1832-10 or 16 June 1909), clergyman. (Rev. Augustus Langcake, S. J.) There has been much uncertainty over the name in the sources, with the spellings August and Augustus, and Landcake, Langcale and Langeake found. Born in London, Eng. He is said to have been a convert from Protestantism. In 1850, he entered the Jesuit order. As a tutor and later a professor of Latin, he taught in New York 1851-1856 at St. John’s College, which was incorporated as a university in 1846 and was renamed Fordham University in 1907. He died in New York. At the time of his death he was associated with St. Francis Xavier Church in New York.

     Beginning on 18 June 1872, Fr Langcake was in GC as a missionary preacher, resuming a mission he had begun some months earlier in the Cornwall-GC area. Altogether, the places at which Fr Langcake preached in GC were, or included, St. Alexander’s at Lochiel, St. Raphael’s, Williamstown and Alexandria. Particularly in the resumed mission of June, he produced probably the greatest tension there has ever been in GC between Roman Catholics and Protestants. Normally, relations between the two groups have been excellent, even throughout the 19th century, the age of maximum such strife elsewhere in Canada. This time, in reply, two Protestant meetings were held in Alexandria (2 and 9 July), at least one of them an outdoor meeting. The Langcake tour was also involved in politics. The federal election campaign of that year was in July to Sept., and whatever the motives with which the missionary began, he became involved as a force to be used by the local Conservatives and anti-Sandfieldites in the campaign against the Liberal candidate, Donald A. Macdonald, of the Sandfield brothers. (Hugh R. Macdonald was the Conservative candidate.) In November 1872, the celebrated convert to Protestantism, Fr Chiniquy, visited Alexandria. What this sequence of events meant to contemporaries is probably now impossible to recover. The printed word, which is what mainly survives, is probably an unreliable guide to what people were thinking and were privately saying. In 1872, the parish priest of Alexandria was Fr O’Connor, and Alexandria did not have its first resident minister till 1873, the Rev. Kenneth Mcdonald.

     No record has been found of Fr Langcake being in GC after 1872. Moreover, it is hard not to suspect that after the unfortunate year 1872 the political managers of the county took care to avoid even the appearance of exploiting religious divisions to secure votes.

Information kindly supplied by the archives of Fordham University and of the Jesuit Fathers, Canada * Langcake visit: True Witness 12 July 1872; Witness 27 July & 17 Aug. 1872; MacGillivray & Ross 173, 689; and a very detailed article, “Popery Unveiled in Glengarry,” British American Presbyterian (1872) * Chiniquy visit: True Witness 29 Nov. 1872