(27 June 1816-1 Feb. 1901), judge and historian. (J.F. Pringle, Judge Pringle) Born at Valenciennes, France, where his father was serving as a soldier in the British Army. Parents: James Pringle (d. 1860) and his wife Ann Margaret Anderson (d. 1870). James Pringle met his future wife while he was serving in Canada during the War of 1812. Not long after the birth of Jacob Farrand Pringle, the Pringles settled at Cornwall, Canada. Jacob Farrand Pringle was educated in the local schools. The Rev. Hugh Urquhart was one of his teachers. Having studied law, Pringle was admitted to the legal profession in 1838. In Cornwall, where he practised law, he was mayor in 1855 and 1856. He was appointed crown attorney and clerk of the peace in 1858, then junior judge of the county court for SDG in 1866, and in 1878 judge of the same without the limiting “junior” designation. In 1894, a grand jury paid him the following tribute: “We wish to thank your honour for the able and instructive address at the opening of this session, and congratulate you on your long term of office and we sincerely hope that the ‘Judge of all the earth’ may bless you with health and strength for many years so that you may continue to serve these United Counties with the same grace and dignity that has characterized your efforts in the past.”

     He served in the loyal forces in the suppression of the Rebellion of 1837-1838. In 1844 he was married to Isabella Fraser, daughter of Col. Alexander Fraser of Fraserfield. (ten children) This marriage brought him into an important family connection. Isabella Fraser had sisters married to Dr D.E. McIntyre and to the Hon. D.A. Macdonald, and her brother married the sister of Sir Richard Scott. Judge Pringle died at Cornwall, on the day before Queen Victoria’s funeral, having, like his queen, lived a few weeks into the new century. He was a Presbyterian, and was an elder in St. John’s Presbyterian Church, Cornwall. He had been for a time a Mason, but he had not continued as one. (Rose, 675) Politically he was a Conservative, but after 1858 he ceased to vote. (Rose, 675) His many interests included curling. His wife outlived him, to die in 1910 (her obituary, Cornwall Freeholder 23 Dec. 1910). She was a Presbyterian, and the first president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union of Cornwall, founded in 1892.

     Judge Pringle was the author of a well-written local history, rich in facts and in understanding, which has been valued for more than a hundred years, his Lunenburgh or the Old Eastern District (Cornwall, Published by the Standard Printing House, 1890; pp. xix, 423). The work includes valuable material on the early history of Glengarry. Pringle was more interested in social history than J.G. Harkness, but less interested in biography. Lunenburgh or the Old Eastern District was reprinted in 1972 by Mika Silk Screening Limited, Belleville, Ont., with the addition of a short index. A very useful larger index by Lyall Manson was published about 1975. Pringle was also the author of The Genealogy of Jacob Farrand Pringle and his wife Isabella Fraser Pringle (Cornwall Standard Print, 1892; pp. 37).

     One of the ten children of Jacob Farrand Pringle and his wife was Robert A. Pringle (1855-1922), who was a lawyer in Cornwall and Ottawa. He was Conservative MP for Stormont County from 1900 to 1908, and he had, at various times during his Cornwall years, James Leitch, J.A.C. Cameron, and A.L. Smith as his law partners.

     Jacob Farrand Pringle’s brother James Dunbar Pringle married Mary Fraser, another daughter of Col. Alexander Fraser of Fraserfield. Like his brother, James Dunbar Pringle was a lawyer, and from 1844 to 1850 the brothers were law partners in Cornwall. Gertrude, the daughter of James Dunbar Pringle and his wife, was married to E.H. Tiffany, the Alexandria lawyer.

Glengarry News 8 Feb. 1901 * Genealogy, 1892, as cited * Harkness & Senior (portraits) * life in Rose, i, 674-676 * MDict * MacGillivray & Ross 663 * 1894 tribute: Archives of Ontario, U. C. SDG Minute Book Gen. Sessions 1883-1899 * Robert A. Pringle: Harkness; life in Charlesworth 105-106; Johnson (1968); obituary, Cornwall Freeholder 12 Jan. 1922 * James Dunbar Pringle: Harkness * Lyall Manson, An Index of Names in “Lunenburgh or the Old Eastern District” (SDG. Historical Society, n.d.), with portrait * Bibliography of Glengarry: index * advert. for J. F. Pringle, ßbarrister and attorney at law, Cornwall Observer 18 Nov. 1841 * Pringle and discovery in 1868 of fossil whale near Cornwall, Bibliography of Glengarry 12 * son W. R. Pringle wounded in North-West Rebellion, CF 15 May 1885, cited DTL Standard Freeholder 14 May 1949 * article on printing of Pringle’s Lunenburgh 45 years before, at Cornwall, Standard Freeholder 6 Feb. 1935 (Supplement) * Weber & Co., of Cornwall, have 150 copies of Lunenburgh for sale, CF 3 July 1924 * advert. in GN 27 April 1972 for Mika reprint of Pringle’s Lunenburgh