(c. 1848-?), newspaperman. (J. C. McNeil) McNeil was a Nova Scotian, though exactly where he was born (which may not, of course, have been in Canada) is not known. He began work about 1863, at the age of fifteeen, as a clerk in a general store in Nova Scotia. He worked afterwards for three years in a customs house, and was a schoolteacher, and for a time he prospered in real estate in Boston. Moreover, he appears also to have been on the staff of the Montreal Post, probably not long before coming to GC. J. C. McNeil published a weekly newspaper called The Glengarry Times at Lancaster, GC. (For the economic buoyancy of Lancaster at this time, see the entry for Donald McNaughton) The first issue was dated 24 Dec. 1880. Thereafter, apart from missing some weeks of publication in its first winter, the paper ran till June or July 1882, when, The Cornwall Reporter of 15 July 1882 said, it “succumbed to the Sheriff.” The Glengarry Times reappeared briefly in the summer of 1883, then was gone forever.

     This was the first newspaper published in GC, and the only one ever published at Lancaster (unless some of the recent free circulation publications are an exception). The newspaper’s office was at Lancaster, but at first the printing was done in Montreal. It was not until it had been in publication for about a half-year that its own press was installed at Lancaster. The Glengarry Times was a well-prepared, interesting, fact filled newspaper, which gives a vivid picture of the GC life of the day. An almost complete file of the issues which survives in the National Library in Ottawa is a valuable source for GC history. The newspaper began as politically independent, though it had taken up Conservative loyalties by the time publication was suspended in 1882. Almost certainly, a major reason why the paper did not prove viable was its failure to obtain one of those rewarding political alliances normally found necessary by the weeklies of the small-town Eastern Ontario of the time.

     After the renewed failure of the paper in 1883, McNeil sought employment from R. R. (Big Rory) McLennan, in a letter dated 30 Sept. 1883 in which he gives a sketch of his life, and declares that he is now destitute and has to begin the world anew. Beyond this date no information has come to light about his life. He was only 35 years old at this time, so a long career may have followed. McNeil seems to have got on reasonably well with the local people, though he made himself briefly unpopular by publishing an attack on Princess Louise (the daughter of Queen Victoria) and her husband the Marquess of Lorne (the governor general). A. W. McDougald, who as an enterprising schoolboy in Alexandria was a paid contributor to the Lancaster Times, records that he was paid in the form of bills on Toronto medical houses that advertised in the newspaper. He also notes that McNeil was “at the time understood to have some connection with the London Times”–though this was, presumably, a piece of GC myth-making.

See MacGillivray & Ross 165-168, 668, 688-689, for a more detailed (and more fully documented) history of the rise and fall of McNeil’s newspaper * Harkness 380-381 * letter of 30 Sept. 1883, McNeil to McLennan, in Archives of Ontario-RRM * A. W. McDougald, Glengarry News 3 Feb. 1933 (in his history of GC) * McNeil’s son is ill with diphtheria, Cornwall Freeholder 2 Dec. 1881 * issue of Glengarry Times of 22 April 1882 (a copy of this issue is also in National Library) found behind a wall in an Apple Hill house, GN 27 April 1951