(1842-27 Feb. 1918), contractor. (D. D. McBean) Born in Lancaster Township, GC. Parents: Donald McBean and his wife Ann Morrison. Educated locally. He began his contracting career with the Grand Trunk Railway. Later, he became a large-scale contractor in the United States. Part of his American work as a contractor was on the Northern Pacific Railroad. In New York, he built the 125th Street Bridge, the Riverside Drive viaduct, a part of the Croton Aqueduct, and a tunnel under the Harlem River completed in 1905. In Chicago he built the La Salle Street Tunnel under the Chicago River. He died in his apartments at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City and is buried at Morris, Illinois. Presbyterian. He was married to Annie Whitaker Crellin. (one child)

     In 1905, he was given the honorary degree of LL.D. by Queen’s University. At the degree-giving ceremony of convocation, which D. D. McBean was unable to attend for reasons of illness, the eminent Prof. Nathan Dupuis read the citation, which contained the statement that “Mr. McBean is more than a contractor, he has become an eminent engineer. His most recent and distinguished work, to which he has brought the highest powers of his inventive and constructive skill, and which is at once the envy and admiration of leading engineers from various countries, is a new tunnel under the Harlem River, built under most adverse conditions and on hitherto untried principles of engineering construction, and principles which are bound to revolutionize the practice of tunnel making.” In a letter of thanks, which Dupuis read to convocation, McBean stated “I have never felt any lack of confidence in myself to grapple with any difficulty that I ever met with in building tunnels, which is my special work in life, but I do not feel the same confidence in addressing an audience; and I will, therefore, only add that I always wish to be classed with the warmest supporters of the prosperity of Queen’s University.” Both the citation and the letter mentioned McBean’s GC birth and both stressed McBean’s continuing Canadianness, even though he was “domiciled in another country.”

     The New York Times obituary, which gives his name as Donald Duncan McBean [order of names sic] describes him as an “engineer and inventor of the subaqueous sectional tunnel, which is built on land before it is sunk into a river bed and joined.” The obituary stresses that “In 1913 Mr McBean sued the City of New York for $1,000,000 claiming that the patent rights in the construction of the Harlem River tunnel and the Lexington Avenue subway, with both of which he had been identified, had been infringed.” And it adds that “He built the north thirteen miles of the new Croton Aqueduct, the Albany waterworks tunnel, and several other tunnels in various parts of the country.”

     McBean was the author of the following pamphlets: (1) Excavation (1890?), (2) “What Is a Million Dollars to the City of New York, Anyway? ” (1912), an open letter to the mayor of New York on savings to be made by following the author’s system of tunnel and subway construction, (3) An Open Letter to the Mayor of the City of New York (1916), on building a 16-track railroad subway.

     The distinction must be advanced with caution, and would no doubt come better from one old friend to another than one statistician to another, but McBean was unusual as a major GC contractor who flourished in the developed east of the U. S. when so many of his fellow contractors preferred the “new” country west of the Mississippi.

New York Times 1 March 1918 * Ross, Lancaster, 289-290 * Morgan (1912) 747-748 * Queen’s University Journal, 32: 12 (1 May 1905) 441-442 * receives Queen’s LL. D., Glengarry News 4 May 1905 * Dictionary Catalog of the Research Libraries of the New York Public Library 1911-1971, Vol. 450 (1979) 275