(5 May 1790-21 April 1855), clergyman. Born at Fort Augustus, Scotland. His father’s name was William McKenzie. John McKenzie attended the local grammar school and King’s College, Aberdeen, and worked as a schoolmaster as a student and after graduation. Having received a call from the Presbyterian congregation at Williamstown, GC, he was ordained in Scotland 23 Dec. 1818, and arrived in Williamstown the next year, and remained pastor at Williamstown till his death, some 36 years later. He was the second pastor of the Presbyterian church at Williamstown, succeeding (though after an interval of several years) the Rev. John Bethune. When McKenzie arrived he was, it is believed, the only Church of Scotland pastor in Ontario. At Williamstown, he preached twice a Sunday, in English and in Gaelic, and conducted Bible classes between the sermons. He also conducted religious services regularly for some years at Summerstown and Lancaster, and even occasionally in northern GC and Northern Stormont, and even at times across the St. Lawrence in Huntingdon County (and Huntingdon people crossed over to Glengarry for religious purposes).

     In 1831, he became the first moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. At the time of the suppression of the 1837 Rebellion, he accompanied the loyal forces as a chaplain. A peaceable, unaggressive man, he took the Church of Scotland side in the Disruption, but counselled caution and tolerance. In an ugly incident of 1845, he was slighted at Kirk Hill when a huge crowd attended the services of a Free Church preacher, leaving him with only 30 hearers. Known to many of the eminent early 19th-century men in this dictionary, he was pastor at Williamstown when John Rae was a schoolmaster there and when the future Sir Roderick Cameron was growing up. He died at Williamstown, and he and his wife are buried in St. Andrew’s cemetery. He was married to Jessie Fraser, the daughter of a clergyman. Her sisters were the Jane and Jemima Fraser (see Fraser, the Misses) who conducted a girls’ school at Williamstown, and she herself occasionally accepted pupils. A sizeable collection of his papers survives in the National Archives among the papers of the McGillivrays of Dalcrombie.

There are two important recent secondary sources, his life by H. J. Bridgman in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, VIII, 560, and the passages on him, amounting to a good, sustained, short life, in MacMillan, Kirk. Also, Centenary 1912 has a portrait and biog. data, and is near enough to his lifetime to rest on reasonably reliable traditions. * Sellar (1963) 187, 198, 223, 603 * Fraser, Gravestones, I, 174 * Rattray, III, 879-880 * Oct. 1819, receives permission to perform marriages, Pringle 62-63