(20 March 1868-31 July 1947), clergyman and publisher. (George W. Conners, G. W. Conners) (The name is sometimes misspelled Connors) Born in Elgin, Ont. He was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1901. Having to leave the ministry for reasons of health, he entered the printing trades. From 1905 to 1908, he published the Delta Pilot newspaper at Delta, Ont ., then in the spring of 1908 he went to Maxville to establish a printing office and newspaper there. By late April, he was planning to have his printing office in Maxville in operation by about the 1st of May. (Glengarry News 24 April 1908) The first issue of the newspaper, called The Maxville Advance, appeared in the week of 12 June1908. (GN 12 June 1908) By late Sept. 1908, however, Conners had rented his Maxville printing plant to a Mr Duggan. (GN 25 Sept. 1908) In 1908, also, Conners became pastor of the Maxville, Dominionville and Tayside Baptist churches, serving till his resignation in Feb. 1910. The exact sequence of events in Conners’ Maxville years is now probably impossible to reconstruct. Conners regarded his printing activities as unsuitable to combine with his pastorate, though it was not until the fall of 1909 that he was completely free of the business entanglements. Meanwhile, he had discontinued the newspaper.

     Only one issue of The Maxville Advance is known to survive, that of 16 Sept. 1910 in the Archives of Ontario. This is an issue from the period after Conners left Maxville and represents the venture of another owner. The year 1910 may have seen the last of The Maxville Advance. An earlier Maxville newspaper called the Advertiser had begun about 1904, but presumably it too was short lived and no copies at all of it are known to survive.

     The Rev. George W. Conners worked for a real estate firm in Toronto after leaving Maxville. He returned to the ministry in 1916 and served first as a Baptist minister and afterwards as a Presbyterian minister till his retirement in 1939. He died at Paris, Ont. There is a good biographical sketch of the Rev. George W. Conners by his son Ibra L. Conners, “The Delta Pilot and Its Publisher, Rev. Geo. W. Conners,” published in Families, 18:1 (1979), with portrait. Ibra L. Conners worked for his father at the printing office in Maxville and afterwards was a plant pathologist. See the life of Rev. George W. Allen in this dictionary for another Baptist clergyman who was also a publisher at Maxville.

Ibra L. Conners as cited * Maxville (1991) 76, 127-129, 184 * short history of Maxville newspapers in GN Commemorative Issue, 8 Feb. 1952 * Bibliography of Glengarry 191 (GC newspapers)