(1854-Nov. 1945), workman, personality. (Rory J. Chisholm, Rory Chisholm, Roderick J. Chisholm) Born probably in 9th Concession of Kenyon Township, between Skye and Dunvegan, GC. He is remembered to have been baptized by the Rev. Daniel Gordon (father of the novelist “Ralph Connor”). Rory Chisholm seems to have spent his working career in construction work. When working in Michigan, he met and married his wife Mary Burke (d. June or July 1944). About 1888 he returned with her to Canada, where his employers over the years included the Donald R. Mcdonald construction company, and where Chisholm and his wife had a home at Vankleek Hill. They were the parents of the celebrated filmmaker and stuntman, John James (Jack) Chisholm. Rory Chisholm was one of the people who in 1917 at the construction site of the Vankleek Hill Presbyterian church went to the rescue of the Alexandria contractor John J. MacIntosh at what proved to be MacIntosh’s fatal accident.

     According to a hazy tradition, on which no reliance can now be placed, Rory Chisholm befriended the young Harry Falconer McLean who accordingly in the years of his wealth rewarded his patron by buying him a house. By another, and perhaps no sounder report, he was one of McLean’s construction supervisors and McLean paid for Chisholm’s son Jack, the future stunt man, to go to college. Evidently a man of character and personality, Rory Chisholm was remembered for his complaint that the people who were planning to place kitchen facilities in his church at Vankleek Hill were trying to make a Joe Beef canteen out of the Presbyterian church. (Joe Beef, the proprietor of a famous working-class eating place in Montreal, has a life in Dictionary of Canadian Biography XI, 563-565 )

     An obituary writer termed Chisholm a “widely known and outstanding Glengarry personality,” and added “He was a great historian who knew the genealogy of the early Glengarry families. His retentive memory made him an authority on the background and development of Glen. County by those early Highlanders.” This passage incorporates an identification, which was long in dying in GC, of a historian as essentially someone who had a wonderful knowledge (rarely commited to paper) of family histories. The obituaries likewise cited him as an old railroader, saying “Many of the railroads of Canada were forged through virgin forest by the energy of Rory Chisholm and many of his Glengarry compatriots.” He was blind during the last nine years of his life, but “to the end retained his memory and celtic sense of humour.” “All those who came within his sphere of influence were inspired by his fortitude and courage during nine years of complete blindness.” His funeral service was at Knox Presbyterian Church, Vankleek Hill, and he was buried at Greenwood Cemetery, Vankleek Hill. (five children, three surviving him) His sister was married to the merchant John Roy McLaurin, also of Vankleek Hill. Rory Chisholm’s son-in-law Dr J. Oliver Hamilton, a World War I British Army doctor who “was in charge of an ambulance train in some of the major battles of the Great War and was active in the battle at Mons and the Somme,” died in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1938. (Glengarry News 25 Feb. 1938) The subject of the present article was probably the Rory Chisholm of Vankleek Hill who provided information for a 1935 article on Allan Gorrach MacRae in the Vankleek Hill Review. And he was perhaps the Rory Chisholm who is thanked among “older residents of the community” for contributing information to the Rev. Donald N. MacMillan’s 1940 Historical Sketch of the Kenyon Presbyterian Church. Jack Chisholm is said to have published an article about his father, but no copy has been found. It may be suspected Jack had a hand in the two obituaries of Rory used in the present article. Perhaps this is what is meant.

Vankleek Hill Review and Standard Freeholder both 22 Nov. 1945 (Neatby) * Lochinvar to Skye 229-233, 335 * private information * anecdote about Rory Chisholm and his schoolteacher daughter, Butternuts and Maple Sugar 301