Unfortunate Child
UNFORTUNATE CHILD … not John A. of Kingston, for by all accounts he’d rather drink whiskey than make it, but John A. of Perth, who’d rather sell it than drink it …1 John A. McLaren (1831-1901) On Saturday December 7, 1901, 70-year-old John A. McLaren, suffered what the local newspaper called “a slight apoplectic attack”2; but despite the best efforts of local practitioner Dr. David Munro (1842-1903), assisted by “Dr. Stewart3, the Montreal specialist”, Perth’s ‘Whiskey4 King’ died of “acute spinal paralysis”5 on Wednesday, December 11th. Described by the Perth Courier as the community’s “keenest businessman and largest individual taxpayer”6, McLaren was a very wealthy man and, as his condition deteriorated over those five days in December, business associates, employees, friends, family and the merely curious converged on his Wilson Street7 home. Among these was his half-sister, Elizabeth ‘Eliza’ Cameron-McIntyre (1841-1915) of Renfrew, who arrived at his bedside on Monday evening December 9th. Eliza’s concern, however, was not primarily for John A.’s comfort in his final hours, but for what she hoped to gain by his imminent death. Two days later, as John A. breathed his last, Eliza crept into “a room at the end of the hall [and], from the top of a red box, took down a brown valise”8 containing McLaren’s most important personal papers. She broke open the lock, extracted her brother’s last will and testament and, enraged by what she read, “sent it up in smoke”.9 1 Perth Courier, December 15, 1865.
[Show full text]