(died 10 Feb. 1933, aged 72), entrepreneur. (Sandy LaRue, Stanislas LaRue, sp. Larue also found) (date of death 4 Feb. also found) Born at Ste-Martine, Huntingdon County, Que. His father, also called Stanislaus, was a miller, and died in Edmonton, 18 Feb. 1902, aged 62. Sandy LaRue, the subject of the present article, worked as a young man as a clerk and bookkeeper on the Gatineau River, presumably, given this location, in the lumber trade. He left for the West in 1882, apparently in the first instance for Winnipeg. LaRue, later to be a pioneer merchant and developer of Edmonton, is said to have arrived in the Edmonton area in 1883 and to have discovered in that year the promising site of what was later the Edmonton suburb of Winterburn. He was a merchant in partnership with Joseph Henry Picard from c. 1889 to c. 1907, in the firm LaRue & Picard. Picard was a member of the Edmonton council when Edmonton became a city in 1904. One of LaRue’s Edmonton associates also was the newspaper proprietor and MP, Frank Oliver (1853-1933). An extensive landowner in Edmonton, Sandy LaRue ranked as nearly a millionaire before he was wrecked by a financial crash in WWI, and he had some reputation as a philanthropist. “A little five inch column in the daily papers is his reward for not having died a millionaire!” (obituary, Standard Freeholder) He died in Edmonton. Roman Catholic. His wife, Elizabeth Kelly, was from Alexandria, GC, and after being a Swift Current resident is said to have arrived in Edmonton the year before Sandy. They had no children. With his encouragement, other members of the LaRue family settled on land near Edmonton. LaRue himself was probably never a GC resident but he was related to the LaRue (Leroux) family of GC and Cornwall, and to Gilbert A. LaRue.
Edmonton Journal 11 Feb. 1933, & (largely by Gilbert A. LaRue) Standard Freeholder 15 March 1933 * “Pioneer Businessman Laid City Foundation,” Edmonton Journal, 2 April 1955 * death notice of his father, Edmonton Bulletin 21 Feb. 1902 *J. G. MacGregor, Edmonton: a History (2nd edn., 1975) 117, 132 , 133