(10 March 1875-13 June 1947), businessman. (E. J. Dever, Ed Dever) Born at Merrickville, Ont. Parents: William Dever and his wife Ellen Brennan. He took an agricultural course at Kemptville, Ont. (perhaps on cheesemaking), paying his own way. He may have been a cheesemaker at Glen Sandfield in 1897-1898. He was a cheesemaker at Martintown by 1898, and was afterwards a cheesemaker at Bridge End. He operated a general store at Dalhousie Station, Que. (just east of the provincial border) from 1902 till 1910, at which time he bought the stock of an Alexandria merchant, Donald McPhee, and moved to Alexandria and began as a general store merchant there. (Glengarry News 3 Oct. 1902, 4 March 1910). For the remainder of his life, his home was in Alexandria. He was one of Alexandria’s leading businessmen and most prominent citizens during the discouraging years of the 1920s, when Alexandria faced the loss of its once promising industrial sector, and the harsh 1930s of the Depression.

     His private financial affairs crashed for a time, following the 1929 stock market crash. His store in Alexandria was destroyed by a fire on 28 Aug. 1931, and when he was rebuilding it it was wiped out by another fire, on 13 Feb. 1932.

     Dever’s importance as a businessman was deeply rooted in the agricultural life of GC, rather than in the town itself. He “held an important place in the dairy industry of Glengarry during nearly fifty years of residence in the county. He had represented the firm of Lovell & Christmas as buyer on the [cheese] boards at Alexandria, Cornwall, Vankleek Hill and Cassburn for many years and in the 1920s almost all the cheese produced in Glengarry had passed through his hands. Mr. Dever’s was a familiar figure at the meetings of cheese boards and his thorough knowledge of cheese both from the production and the merchandising angles was made use of on many occasions by officers of the various boards.” In 1932, he was appointed manager of the egg-grading station which, under control of the federal Dept. of Agriculture, was due to be opened in Alexandria the following April (Glengarry News 25 Nov. 1932), and he operated the egg-grading station till nearly the end of his life. Egg-grading stations, of which this was the first in the Alexandria area, were important in the marketing of eggs, and this one mattered especially in GC at a time when virtually every farm had its own small laying flock contributing significantly to the normally very meagre income of the farm. Even in the egg business, the affairs of the great world outside impinged, for in 1942 it was reported that he had received instructions that all eggs from the current week were to be packaged for export as part of a “five carloads” lot for wartime Britain. (GN 30 Jan. 1942)

     Like so many of the 20th-century Alexandria businessmen, he was active in a wide variety of activities. He sold goods to country stores and supplies to cheese factories. In 1939 he was selling cream separators to farmers. (advert., GN 27 Oct. 1939) He acted as agent for several insurance companies. The “Dever Block” in Alexandria took its name from him. From 1917, he lived in the fine, large house on Kenyon Street East, Alexandria, which was later, temporarily, the convent of the Our Lady’s Missionaries. (See Donald Ranald Macdonald)

     Early in 1927, he was appointed police magistrate for Alexandria (GN 4 Feb. 1927) and held the position for some 10 years. He belonged to the separate school board and the high school board in Alexandria. His hobbies included bridge and curling. A man of varied interests, he was a local correspondent for the Ottawa Journal. (His townsman, Clarence Ostrom, was the correspondent for the rival Ottawa English-language daily, the Citizen). In politics, Dever was a Conservative.

     He was noted for his genial disposition. He learned to speak a little Gaelic, perhaps acquired from his Gaelic-speaking McCormick in-laws. He died in the Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal. Roman Catholic. He is buried in St. Finnan’s cemetery.

     He was married at St. Finnan’s Cathedral on 7 June 1898, when he was 23, to Harriet (Hattie) McCormick (Glengarry News 10 June 1898), of the Lochiel Township McCormicks and Kenyon Township Camerons. (five children, four daughters surviving him) His widow died Oct. 1961. One of their daughters, Mildred (B. A., Queen’s, 1933), was a high school teacher, teaching at Alexandria High School for 7 years up to 1941, and afterwards elsewhere in Ontario including, finally, Ottawa. She never married, and lived her last years in Alexandria, in an apartment overlooking the town lake, a charming, conscientious, cultivated, and altogether worthy survivor of an older Glengarry and of the vanished early days of women at Queen’s, and died in Ottawa General Hospital 15 Jan. 2004, aged 92. She was the last surviving of E. J. Dever’s children. Also, one of the Dever daughters married Hubert, the son of Col. A. G. F. Macdonald, and another daughter married Louis, son of J. A. C. Huot.

Glengarry News 20 June 1947 (QF) * private information * McCormicks: index * Ostrom 128, 145 * obituary of Joseph Edmond Lalonde, once Dever store employee, GN 10 March 1939 * Mildred Dever: GN 21 Jan. (portrait) & 24 March 2004; personal knowledge * genealogical sketch of his descendants, prepared by Evelyn Scullion