(7 April 1908-10 May 1999), farmer. Born in the St. Bernardin area, Prescott County, Ont. Parents: William Terry and his wife, Margaret Willard, who was from Maxville. His formal education was limited to primary school, which he attended at a public school on the Ridge Road. Melvin Terry farmed for some 28 years in the 6th Concession of Caledonia Township, in the St. Bernardin area, where on a farm of only 27 acres, and that of poor land, he adjusted his agriculture to the local conditions and managed to survive, with crops which included strawberries and potatoes. Meanwhile, he had been married on 19 Sept. 1943, at St. Bernard’s Parish Church, Fournier, near his home, to Phyllis Muir. (one child) In 1952 they moved from the St. Bernardin area, where he had lived from birth, to a new and better farm on the 6th Concession of Lochiel Township, GC, between Laggan and Dalkeith. Thereafter, he reported, farming was easy. In 1972 he and his wife retired from farming and moved to Dalkeith, where he worked for a time in Kenneth MacLennan’s sawmill. He was noted in retirement for his skillful vegetable and flower gardening. A visitor to his home at Dalkeith in 1993 found him “a small passionate man, wiry and articulate, rather young looking for his years.” He died at the Glengarry Memorial Hospital, Alexandria, having been hospitalized during his last two years. He was a Roman Catholic. He is buried at Fournier Parish cemetery. At his St. Bernardin area home, living in a francophone neighbourhood, he accepted the inevitable and learned to speak French, but he spoke feelingly years later about the terrible struggle his mastering of the language had been (using the phrase “oh my it was hard!,” or words close to those). Eventually, he was able to act as an interpreter for insurance men and the like. He is one of the relatively few Irish Catholics included in this dictionary, a descendant of settlers from Tipperary, and a reminder that GC, historically dominated by two ethnic groups, lacked a large Irish component, either Roman Catholic or Protestant.

     In his later years Melvin Terry attracted much local notice as the author of 14 remarkable articles recalling his youth and early experiences of agriculture, published in the Vankleek Hill Review between 29 July 1992 and 13 July 1994. A man with a natural gift for writing, and a lively, restless mind, he gave freshness to what many will describe as the well-worn topic of rural Ontario life, avoiding what have seemed to some the irritating conventionalities of this topic. With a taste for theory, he liked to explain why things happened, not merely to say what happened. The articles touch only marginally on GC, but the marshes and prairie-like flat land he knew in Caledonia Twp always fascinated the northern Glengarry farmers, who, just a short distance away, lived in a world geographically so different.

Glengarry News 19 May 1999, Vankleek Hill Review 16 June 1999 * private information , personal knowledge * interview-article on him, by Louise Sproule, VKHR 16 June 1993 (with portraits, 1993 quotation not from this source) * Thomas 626 * Neil Parker, ed., 125 Fournier: 1867-1992 (1992) 812-818 * Bibliography of Glengarry 176