(20 Oct. 1829-13 Feb. 1913), carriagemaker, hotelkeeper. (Allan J. McDonald (Wheelwright), Allan (the Wheelwright) MacDonald) Born on Lot 11, 8th Concession of Charlottenburgh Township., which is in the St. Raphael’s/Glen Roy area of GC. Parents: John Archibald Ban MacDonald and his wife Mary MacDonald. As a young man, he was trained as a wheelwright. In Alexandria, where he settled about 1855, he followed the carriage-making business, and afterwards operated the St. Lawrence Hall, which was a hotel on Main Street, Alexandria. About 1883, he built the Grand Union Hotel on Mill Square, Alexandria, and he operated it into the 1890s. During his later years he was retired (dates vary) from active business life. His place of death was presumably Alexandria. (ten children, eight surviving him) Roman Catholic. He was married at St. Finnan’s Church on 22 June 1856 to Mary McPhee (Aug. 1834-1 Feb. 1909). With his brother-in-law James MacPhee of Alexandria (who was married to a daughter of Senator D. McMillan), he built the presbyteries at St. Raphael’s and Lochiel. Allan J.’s “passing away,” the Glengarry News obituary noted, “severs another link between the pioneer days and the present.” His surviving children included Dr Hugh J. Mcdonald of Butte, Mont., and Dr Patrick A. McDonald (Dr Pat, P. A. McDonald) of Penetanguishene, Ont. Dr Patrick (17 March 1863-13 Aug. 1949), a medical graduate of McGill, practised in Alexandria for a few years from 1892 and perhaps briefly in Pueblo, Colo., before he settled in his long-term home and place of practice, Penetanguishene, in 1897. There, so far as a conclusion can be approached on merely negative evidence, it seems he practised privately rather than at the mental hospital. He died at Penetanguishene.

     Dr D. D. Macdonald in his poem “A Trip to the Cairn” (1919) noted how customs had changed “since ‘Wheelwright’s’ day–it seems another age,/When the McPhees and he held sway, and Dewar drove their stage.” J. Lockie Wilson in his unpublished recollections of boyhood in Alexandria noted as an example of the force of the GC practice of giving people peculiar names that he was still unable to say whether Allan the Wheelwright was a MacDonald or a MacPhee.

Cornwall Freeholder (two notices) & Glengarry News both 21 Feb. 1913 * St. Finnan’s CRNI, II, 296 (marriage) * 50th wedding anniversary, GN 29 June 1906 (has biog. data, portrait) * obituaries of his wife, GN 5 Feb. 1909, & her brother James MacPhee, GN 14 & 21 Dec. 1928 repr. Fraser Obits. 130-131, 265-266 * Ostrom 34 * GN supplement 1903 [20] * Dr Patrick A. Macdonald: St. Finnan’s CRNI, II, 499; Harkness 461; Ostrom 262; McGill University Archives; GN 21 Jan. 1896, 19 Nov. 1897, 27 June 1919; enquiries at Penetanguishene; he is apparently not in the published history of the Penetanguishene mental health centre