(17 Oct. 1857-5 Aug. 1931), businessman, prominent in the cheese business in GC and Huntingdon County, and afterwards in N. Y. State. Born in Hastings County, Ont. (not, as has been reported, at Bainsville, GC). Parents: John R. McLeod and his wife Margaret Fraser, both born in Scotland, John R. being the son of parents who came to Canada in 1815 and settled in 1816 in GC. Sometime in the years 1861-1867, when Wesley was a child, his parents, who had been farming in Hastings County, and their children moved back to GC, where they farmed on Lot 19, in the 2nd Concession of Lancaster Township. Wesley McLeod attended school locally and attended a commercial college, and was trained as a cheesemaker, the cheese business being at this time new and attractive, and going through its early, heady period of hope and expansion.

     For some nine years, as the employee of D. M. Macpherson, he superintended what are described in his obituary as “some 70 creameries” in GC and Huntingdon County, making his home during this time at Lancaster. Cheese factories and creameries is presumably the phrase the obituary should have used. At some time in his period of association with Macpherson, he was the colleague of J. A. Ruddick in supervising some of the Macpherson enterprises. Afterwards, he was a federal government employee for three years as an instructor in cheesemaking. In 1894, he settled in Utica, N. Y., which was to be his home and the centre of his business activities for the rest of his life. Involved at first in Utica in the buying and exporting of cheese (the exports being to Britain), he moved on to dealing in a full range of dairy products. One of his companies, the Oneida County Creameries Company, which traded in retail dairy products, had some 90 stores in N. Y. State in 1919, when Wesley McLeod severed his interest in it. He died in hospital in Utica. He was married to Mary Smith of Dundee, Que. (children, but none surviving him) He was a Presbyterian. Wesley McLeod was the nephew of Duncan McLeod, the mayor, and was the brother-in-law of Hugh A. McMillan the millwright, who was married to Wesley’s sister Mary.

Utica Daily Press 6 Aug. 1931, repr. in Cornwall Standard 13 Aug. 1931, and, with a portrait and valuable background information on the family, in Ruth McLeod McKendry & Jennifer McKendry, Hold Fast: the Story of William & Catherine McLeod and Their Descendants, Glengarry County (1998) * Fraser, Gravestones, II, 204 (parents) * J.A. Ruddick, “Fifty Years of Dairying,” The Family Herald and Weekly Star, 28 Jan. 1931 * Fraser (1959) 235