(27 Dec. 1862-8 Nov. 1938), farmer. (Alexander Gunn, Alex Gunn, perhaps also called Allie Gunn; the surname in this family was originally Fusée) (date of birth 1857 also found) Born in Township of Finch or Osnabruck, Stormont County. Parents: Alexander Gunn (Alexander Fusée), who was of French origins and died in the American Civil War, and his wife Eleanor or Ella Cook (1827-1911). Alexander Gunn the younger, the subject of the present entry, attended the Athol school, the school of Glengarry School Days, at the same time as the novelist “Ralph Connor” (C. W. Gordon) who was almost his exact contemporary. Young Alexander Gunn was almost certainly the same person as Alexander Fusee, aged 11, or John Fussie, aged 14, both Presbyterians of French descent living in Roxborough Township, Stormont County, who appear in the 1871 census. Alexander Gunn, the subject of the present entry, was for many years a farmer on Highway 43, south of Maxville. In 2002 an elderly lady told Gordon Winter of Maxville that she remembered driving to Apple Hill with her children and offering Gunn a ride, “as he was walking because he didn’t have a car. He told her that she was having the best years of her life with the children.” Alex Gunn, his son W. A., and two of the Carthers are named in William Alfred McIntosh’s verse sketch of his neighbours of 1923. Gunn was married to Margaret Fawcett (1875-1940). (four children) He died in Roxborough Township, and is buried in the Maxville Cemetery.

     Alexander Gunn was probably the original of Fusie, “the little, harum-scarum French waif,” who appears as one of the school-boy characters in Glengarry School Days, where he is the friend of the novel’s hero, the minister’s son Hughie. With regard to his name Fusie, “neither Hughie nor any one else ever knew another name for the little French boy who had drifted into the settlement and made his home with the MacLeods.” As one of Hughie’s “faithful henchmen,” and being a “man of adventure,” he joined Hughie in the snowball attack on Foxy’s play store. (New Canad. Lib. edn., 193, 159, 166, 195, 196 )(For more on Foxy, see George Macdonell of Athol) Percy Carther, of Cornwall, stated in 1981 that he had been “ told by several people including Freddie Christie of Apple Hill, Ont., that ‘Fusie’ was Alex Gunn, whom I knew…” Gunn lived 1/2 mile from Carther’s grandfather. It may be noted that the adopted surname Gunn would be rather more directly based on the French original if the French name had been fusil (gun) rather than fusée (rocket). The name fusil/gun had an odd echo, also, in Glengarry School Days, where the manipulative Foxy, who represents the intruding forces of commercialism in the backwood community, lures the aspiring Hughie into guilt and deception by selling him a pistol, which Hughie can afford only by stealing from his parents. Fusie is one of the lesser characters in the novel, but in a brilliantly-executed cameo sketch he springs to life. Hughie is a little improbable, but Fusie is like a kid we knew. Considering how extensively and successfully the French Canadians of the GC area have been a commercial class, it is remarkable that the Fusie of the novel, recruited into the attack on Foxy, is a force against commercialism.

Standard Freeholder 11 Nov. 1938, Glengarry News 18 Nov. 1938 * gravestone, Maxville * genealogies kindly supplied by Mr David Hough, of Morrisburg * information kindly collected by Gordon Winter, of Maxville, partly though an appeal in his Maxville column GN 31 July 2002, on behalf of the present author * Elliott 95 * letter of Percy Carther to present author, 14 March 1981 * verse sketch: Apple Hill (1982) 76