(died 24 Feb. 1905, aged 24), victim in hockey game. Born before his parents came to Alexandria. Parents: Isaac Laurin and his wife Eloise Joanette. From 1903, Alcide Laurin was an employee of the Glengarry News. In a violence-ridden hockey game at Maxville between the Alexandria and Maxville teams, Alcide Laurin, captain of the Alexandria team (the Alexandria Crescents), was hit on the head with a hockey stick by Allan Loney of Maxville, and died immediately. Allan Loney was tried in Cornwall for manslaughter but was acquitted. Allan Loney was the son of Ephraim A. Loney, a blind merchant who had his store on the Main Street of Maxville. Allan Loney later lived in the Canadian West. Alcide Laurin’s funeral at St. Finnan’s was judged at the time to have been the largest ever held in Alexandria. (Glengarry News 3 March 1905) Through J.A. Laurin’s future wife, who was one of the children in the family of David Courville, which was living near the Loneys in Maxville, the report reached the Laurins that Mrs Ephaim Loney was heard shouting at her son that it would have been better if he had been killed instead. There was also a tradition in the Laurin family that Allan Loney had been acquitted because he was a Mason. Mrs Loney died the year after, in the fall of 1906.

     The Alcide Laurin death played something of the same cataclysmic role in the GC world that the sinking of the Titanic played in the larger world seven years later. Even a century later, it seems a major, not a minor event in the long GC story. The seismologically sensitive ear can still pick up the aftershocks in the widespread GC community. All the same, it is probably impossible to determine now exactly how and why it mattered so much to contemporaries. The generation that had the experience is gone, and in their own time they could perhaps not have explained their own feelings in words to their own satisfaction. The issue was not, openly at least, one of French versus Scottish relations. It did, however, perhaps gain some part of its emotional impact from the sense that in some way the shock waves had reached the very depths of society, where the forces exist to strip away all the bonds of reason and decency on which the tolerable life of people living together in communities depends. When the Maxville centennial history of 1991 was being prepared, there was uncertainty about whether to include a section on the Laurin death. The question was put before Angus H. McDonell, and he advised that the subject be omitted.

     Alcide Laurin’s gravestone in St. Finnan’s cemetery says that he was “tué à Maxville dans une partie de hockey.” He was the brother of Anthime, E. Leo, J. Hector, and J. Albert Laurin of this dictionary. He was a member of the St. Finnan’s Total Abstinence Society. (GN 10 March 1905) He was unmarried.

Glengarry News 3 & 31 March 1905 * articles on the Laurin death, GN 8 July 1992, 23 March 1994, 4 Oct. 2000 (all with portrait) * Archives of Ontario, Criminal Indictment Files: SDG 1881-1920 (for Loney trial) * interview of present author with Alice Laurin (dau. of J. A. Laurin), 10 May 1977 * Ephraim A. Loney: biog. sketch in Munro GN 5 Aug. 1938 (includes the Laurin death), repr. Maxville (1967) 47-48 * death of Mrs Loney remembered, 20 Years Ago column, Cornwall Freeholder 28 Oct. 1926 * Maxville centennial history: Winter GN 30 March 1994, 13 Oct. 1999 * joins GN staff, GN 30 Jan. 1903 * athlete, 23 Oct. 1903 * on committee to organize a hockey club, Alexandria, GN 8 Jan. 1904