====== McRae, Farquhar D. ====== (//fl//. late 19th century-early 20th century), reeve. (Farquhar McRae, F. D. McRae) Parents: Mr and Mrs Donald McRae. Farquhar D. McRae lived at Bridge End, GC, on the farm next to that of his brother Duncan Christopher McRae. On 1 July 1911, Farquhar D. McRae, who was or had been reeve of Lancaster Township, shot and fatally wounded William Shaw of Carp, Ont., who died that evening in Cornwall General Hospital. Farquhar D. McRae was tried in Cornwall at the end of October. Found guilty of manslaughter, and sentenced to life in prison, he served about a year and a half in Portsmouth (Kingston) Penitentiary before being released on the ticket of leave arrangement, which was the parole system of the time. This early release resulted from pressure brought on the government from the people of the GC area, and took into account the fact that he was an elderly man. The fatal shooting had taken place at the farm of Duncan Christopher McRae, and had followed a confrontation as Dr Mack Magee of Carp, Ont., a dentist who was married to Duncan Christopher McRae’s daughter, sought to get possession of the baby, about a half year old, of the Magee couple. The Magee marriage was religiously mixed, the wife being from a Roman Catholic family and Magee being a Protestant. The dead man, William Shaw, a druggist, was an employee or other associate of Dr Magee. There is a most important account, well informed and balanced, by Clarence Ostrom of the killing and trial. Now that the events have passed beyond living memory, Ostrom’s is the best and fullest description there is ever likely to be of what this most sensational set of events meant to GC contemporaries. Ostrom stresses that local Roman Catholics did not expect that McRae would be convicted, and that Catholics on the jury who voted for conviction were later regarded by their fellow Catholics as traitors. The matter does not seem, from Ostrom’s account, to have been part of any sort of Catholic versus Protestant feeling in the GC community. Doubtless, however, contemporaries sensed that the incident had explosive potential in a religiously mixed community, at a time when religious tensions were prominent in the national life. The fatal shooting at Bridge End in 1911 strangely echoes a GC event of a generation earlier. On 5 Dec. 1888, in a brawl at a drinking den at Glen Norman, in the north of Lancaster Township, Duncan A. McRae, the deputy reeve of Lancaster Township, struck or pushed a man called Albert Robinson who in falling struck his head on a stone, and died the following day from his injury. ---- The Shaw death and the subsequent McRae trial were reported in the //Glengarry News//, //Cornwall Freeholder//, and //Cornwall Standard //at the appropriate dates; see, e.g., //GN// 27 Oct. and 3 Nov. 1911 for trial and sentence * Ostrom 317-318 * Ross, //Lancaster//, 275 * state of ex-reeve McRae in prison, monster petition for his release expected, //Cornwall Standard //10 May 1912 * 1888 death: there is a graphic and fairly well detailed description //Gleaner// 13 Dec. 1888, with notice also MacMillan diary 5 Dec. 1888 * coroner’s inquests: reports of findings not located for either death, but Archives of Ontario, RG 22-4986-2 states that an inquest was held 7 Dec. 1888 in the Robinson case [<6>]