(5 Nov. 1808-9 Sept. 1888), lawyer and businessman. Born in Toronto. Parents: Alexander Macdonell of Collachie, MLA for Glengarry County, and his wife Anne Smith. Allan was called to the bar in 1832, and was for a time a law partner of the future Sir Allan Napier MacNab, who was to be one of the premiers of the Province of Canada. Fairly early in life, however, Allan ceased to practise law. For some years from 1837, he was sheriff of the Gore district. From 1846, he spent some years exploring for minerals on the shores of Lake Superior, especially copper. At this stage, he was associated with the project of getting better terms for the Indians of this area in their contests with the government. In 1851 he and others (including his brother Angus Duncan) applied unsuccessfully to the Canadian legislature for a charter to built a railway to the Pacific coast. In the 1850s Allan was an active promoter of the building of a railway through the West, and the annexation of the Hudson’s Bay Company lands to Canada. His later years passed in relative obscurity. He died in Toronto. Apparently he was unmarried.

     Not a Glengarrian by birth and never perhaps a Glengarrian by residence, he nevertheless belongs to the wider GC connection, and his advocacy of a railway through the Canadian West aligns him interestingly with the many contractors born in the GC-area who built railways in the western United States and Canada. He was the author of a number of publications including Observations upon the Construction of a Railroad from Lake Superior to the Pacific (1851). He was the grandson and namesake of the emigration leader Allan Macdonell (d. 1792) of Collachie.

Life by Donald Swainson, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, XI, 552-555 * MDict 500 * Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, IV, 105-106 * Armstrong 170