(died 25 April 1888, aged 52), hotel keeper. (age at death 45 also found) A report on recent growth at Dunvegan in The Cornwall Reporter of 21 May 1881, besides noting that a cheese factory had recently been constructed there out of “two old log houses” (the building seems to have been housewarmed for its new function by holding a dance), mentions also that Alexander McRae has built a large 2 1/2 storey hotel. The hotel at that stage apparently was still merely a timber structure. Then a few months later the Dunvegan columnist in the Glengarry Times of 17 Sept. 1881 wrote, “Mr. Alex. McRae will have finished bricking up his new hotel before the end of the week. It is a neat, commodious three-storey building.” An editorial note in the politically conservative Cornwall Reporter, 8 July 1882, perhaps refers to him, though there must have been other men of his name from the Dunvegan area: “Mr. Alex McRae of Dunvegan came in smiling as usual on Tuesday. Alex. is a plucky fellow. He lives in a bad Grit [i.e., Liberal] neighbourhood but he ‘doesn’t mind them at all’.” Within seven years of completing the hotel, however, Alexander McRae had died at Dunvegan, not far into middle age. His tombstone, which has a Masonic symbol and is situated close to the gravestone of the Rev. Adam Fraser MacQueen, is one of the largest in the Dunvegan Cemetery.

     During approximately the last three years of Alexander’s life, SDG was “dry” under the Canada Temperance Act, so the hotel could not sell drink during that time. A few months after McRae’s death, it was announced that John W. Kennedy, formerly a merchant at Greenfield, had rented the McRae hotel at Dunvegan. The voters had rejected the Scott Act in the spring of 1888, so the way was open for the hotel, if the new management wished, to sell drink. In the Glengarry News of 15 May 1903, W. J. McRae of Dunvegan, Alexander’s son, published a letter to the editor, protesting attacks on his (W. J. McRae’s) being granted a liquor license, and in particular replying to a letter by the Rev. K. A. Gollan in the previous week’s issue. Dunvegan eventually acquired a reputation as a centre of strong temperance loyalties, but getting drinking facilities removed from the village proved to be remarkably slow and difficult. The standard history of the Dunvegan Church notes that the Rev. K. A. Gollan, pastor there 1899-1911, was “largely instrumental in driving the licensed bar out of Dunvegan.” As late as 1907, W. J. MacRae, at Dunvegan, was granted a liquor license. (Glengarry News 26 April 1907)

     Alexander McRae’s hotel evidently served as as a local meeting place to stage public events, and it must have been the McRae’s Hall at which James R. McKenzie was presented with a gold locket in 1886. (See life of McKenzie) This was during the “dry” period aforementioned. The event next to be described was probably not “dry.” The Alexandria newspaper, the Glengarrian, of 18 April 1890, reported on a banquet at Mr Kennedy’s hotel, Dunvegan, for about 50 people, honouring a William Urquhart, who was departing for B. C. The entertainment continued till near daybreak, “and was brought to a close by an all-round shake, a bumper, three rousing cheers and a tiger!” William Urquhart was probably the man from Dunvegan of the same name who as a liquor dealer in Vancouver was murdered at his Vancouver place of business in 1911. (GN 22 Sept. 1911). But with regard to Dunvegan of bygone days, it appears that neither a hotel nor a licensee was needed to create a drinking menace. An alcoholic bachelor farmer at Skye, Ont., well known in the 1940s, was believed to have learned his drinking as a youngster at an illegal drinking place kept by an old lady at Dunvegan a couple of generations before.

     Surviving as a private residence after it ceased to be a hotel, the red-brick 2 1/2-storey (or, arguably, 3 storey) former McRae hotel at the Dunvegan crossroads, across from the Glengarry Pioneer Museum, is still, locally, a well known landmark. Alexander McRae was married to Jane Dey (d. 1913). Several of his children are noticed in the present dictionary in the entry for his son Alexander McRae, lumberman.

Dies: Cornwall Freeholder 27 April 1888, cited 20 Years Ago column, CF 24 April 1908; MacMillan diary * report on funeral at Revelstoke of his widow, Glengarry News 4 April 1913 (from Vancouver Sun) * Kennedy: CF 7 Sept. 1888, cited DTL, Standard Freeholder 6 Sept. 1947 * gravestone, Dunvegan Cemetery * MacMillan, Kenyon Presbyterian Church 22 * Scott Act: MacGillivray & Ross 201-203 and life of Sir Richard Scott this dictionary * bachelor farmer: Little Johnie MacLeod, N1/2, 8-9 Caledonia. The generations pass, and so quickly has Little Johnie been forgotten that he passes unmentioned in the most excellent and thorough Lochinvar to Skye (where he should have appeared at p. 439), but the very family to which he belonged is barely mentioned