(30 April 1904-20 Jan. 1989), physician. (Howard Mitchell, Howard S. Mitchell) Born in Huron County, Ont., in a farm family, by one account, or by another (if indeed, the statements need be seen as differing), at Listowel, just east of Huron County. See below for more on his earliest years. From Queen’s University he got his B.A. in 1925 and his medical degree in 1927. Dr Mitchell practised medicine in Montreal, and was in the Royal Canadian Medical Corps from 1940 to 1945, serving in England and Italy, and obtaining the ranks of major and acting lt.-col. In 1945, he started the allergy clinic at the Montreal General Hospital, and he remained associated with the clinic for some twenty years. With other physicians from McGill University, he was in Kenya in the late 1960s helping to establish a school of medicine. On returning to Canada, he retired from private practice. In 1954, he bought a farm at Breadalbane (formerly owned for several generations by a Campbell family) and he used the farm as a weekend and recreational property. In this area in 1954, “Horses on the road, and horse drawn machinery were in common use.” He did not practice medicine in GC, except in emergencies and other special situations.

     He and his wife were among the very earliest of that vast number of city residents who in recent decades have bought properties in the GC countryside and whose presence has done so much to transform the social landscape of GC. He was familiar with GC as literary terrain through Ralph Connor’s books, but before 1954 he had no personal contact with it. However, a patient from GC, Robert A. Denovan, drew to his attention a farm available there.

     Dr Mitchell was interested in woodlot management and reforestation, and carried out extensive reforestation projects on his GC land. The forest known as the “Howard S. Mitchell Tract” at Breadalbane, formerly his property, came to be owned and managed by the United Counties and open for public enjoyment. Dr Mitchell died at Almonte, Ont., at the home of his daughter, and he is buried at Molesworth, Ont. (two children) He married (1) Elizabeth Bateson-Yates, and (2) Evelyn Ruby Dixon Hamilton.

     In a reply to an article on pipe smoking, and as a warning to the public, he published a vigorously-written letter in the Glengarry News of 17 April 1985 (“Pipe Smoking Is Worse Than You Might Think”), describing his frightful duel with mouth cancer, caused, he believed, by pipe smoking which he had begun in his teens in Huron County, “under the tutelage of the hired man on our farm.” He published four short articles in the issues of Glengarry Life (the annual volume of the Glengarry Historical Society) for 1977, 1978, 1980 and 1988. In these, besides recalling the Huron County farm life of his childhood, Dr Mitchell spoke of his impressions of the narrow, isolated, inward-looking Glengarry he discovered in 1954. All of the passages on GC are of the highest value, and of the greatest interest, as the testimony of an enlightened and intelligent outsider. He was intrigued by a theory which he encountered, to the effect that this area of the province had remained backward, relative to Western Ontario, because it had (allegedly) not participated in the war boom of the American Civil War. Illiteracy existed, he noted, though people of national distinction had been born in the neighbourhood. Interestingly, the neighbourhood in which he settled was that of “Sandy Fraser” (John E. McIntosh), who had died half a dozen years before Dr Mitchell’s arrival.

Glengarry News 8, 15, and 22 Feb. 1989 (letter of tribute) * information from Queen's University Archives * Marion MacMaster, St. Columba Men in Three Wars (1990) * Patricia MacGillis, “Dalkeith Doctor Travels World but Doesn’t Forget to Plant Trees,” GN 6 May 1987 (repr. in GN obituary) * Green 21-22 * GN 7 Oct. 1954, inspects his new farm * buys additional land (Lanthier farm), GN 2 June 1955