====== McKillop, Archibald ====== (4 July 1824 or 1825-26 or 27 Sept. 1904), poet, known as the Blind Bard of Megantic. Born at Lochranza, Arran Island, Scotland. As a small child, he came to Canada in 1829 with his father, Archibald McKillop, who settled at Inverness, Que. and who was later known from his Canadian militia rank as Colonel Archibald McKillop. Col. McKillop, back in Scotland, had been a tax gatherer for the Duke of Hamilton, and he seems to have headed the emigration party which left Lochranza in 1829. Archibald McKillop, the subject of the present entry, attended school at Lachine, Que. He is said to have been a student at the University of Toronto or a law student, and may even have been both. However, he does not appear in the University of Toronto records, nor is he in the Law Society of Upper Canada’s roll of students-at-law during the years when he is most likely to have been a law student (the law studies, of course, need not have been in the upper province). He lost the sight of one eye at 19, apparently from the blow of an ox-horn, when he was a student home for the Christmas holidays, and he was totally blind from about the age of thirty. Before his sight was completely gone, he taught school, and had done so also after his Lachine education. McKillop was a temperance lecturer for many years. It is possible that the title of the Blind Bard of Megantic by which he was known was a platform name he used for his lectures. Inverness, his Canadian home town, is in Mégantic County, Que. He translated some of the Moody and Sankey hymns into Gaelic. In the Montreal //Witness// he published English language poems. He was associated with the Caledonian Society, of Montreal. He was the author of several volumes of verse: //Rhymes for the Times// (1857), //Temperance Odes, and Miscellaneous Poems// (1860), and //The Flood of Death; or, The Malt that Lay in the House that Jack Built// (1875). After his death, his poems were gathered in //Collected Verse “The Blind Bard of Megantic”// (Pp. viii, 9-360), subsidized by a nephew, Neil McKillop. This substantial, well-produced volume had no stated publisher, but was printed in England. It contains a portrait of McKillop as a frontispiece. None of the poems it contains appears to relate to Glengarry. Archibald McKillop had some reputation also, it would seem, as an inventor. For reasons that are not now known, late in life Archibald McKillop threw in his lot with the Glengarry Scots. In 1897, it was reported that he had bought two lots on the main street of Maxville from Malcolm Campbell, and intended to build there. (//Glengarry News// 28 May 1897) Possibly, the continuing prevalence of Gaelic in northwest GC was an attraction. Maxville, of course, also had good rail access to Montreal, where McKillop doubtless had many friends. So far as now can be determined, he seems actually to have lived in Maxville. He died, however, at Kingston, where he had gone to visit a nephew, the Rev. Donald McKillop Solandt. (Solandt appears in Morgan’s biog. dict. of 1912) The //Glengarry News// obituary noted that “Maxville friends” would “learn with surprise” of McKillop’s death, and that he had “moved from Maxville in April last.” Solandt wrote, in his biographical notes in the “Introduction” to the //Collected Verse//, “During his latter years he lived among the Scots of Glengarry. Failing in health he went to visit his nephew, Donald McKillop Solandt, at Kingston, Ontario, where he died…” His will, made about two weeks before his death, is brief and unrevealing, and without clues about why he lived in Maxville, but names him as “Archibald McKillop of the Village of Maxville, retired,” and directs his executor, Solandt, “to sell my land in the Village of Maxville in the County of Glengarry.” Since land rather than a house is mentioned here, it is possible that he lived in lodgings in Maxville, and never got around to building a house. McKillop was buried near his father, at Inverness, Que. He was a Congregationalist. He never married. There was presumably no personal connection, but by way of a parallel case to McKillop being a literary man in northern GC, it may be noted that about this time there was a certain gathering of people of literary and intellectual interests at Lancaster (see Louise Sandfield Macdonald). Somehow, McKillop made little impression on the Glengarrians. By the later part of the 20th century, no oral tradition seems to have survived in GC of the Blind Bard having lived there, his strange sojourn being recorded only in the written word. It is most remarkable that his unusual story missed inclusion in the Glengarry web of history-making and myth-making. It is hard now to estimate his importance in the Canada of his day. No doubt much of his fame–if fame is not too strong a word–rested on platform perfomances the memory of which died with the generation that observed them. Altogether, one may suspect that for the Blind Bard, life was hard, not easy. ---- //Glengarry News// & //Cornwall Freeholder// both 30 Sept. 1904 (a preliminary search has not yielded a Kingston obituary) * biog. data in //Annals of Megantic County// (1902, 1962), //Collected Verse//, and website: The Celtic Way: Inverness (with portrait and poem) * Watters 130 * Whyte, i, 262-263, ii, 413 * information kindly supplied by Law Society of Upper Canada Archives; information (includes gravestone inscription) kindly supplied by Mrs Grace Cox, Megantic County Historical Society; various archivists and librarians have also kindly answered enquiries, usually reporting no records found * will: Solandt papers, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, MS Coll. 158 [<6>]