====== Stewart, William ====== (1803?-21 March 1856), businessman, political figure. Born on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Baptized 24 July 1803. Parents: Ranald Stewart and his wife Isabella McLeod. William Stewart came to Canada in 1816, when his mother emigrated with her ten children (Ranald the father had died by this time). He grew up in GC, where the Stewarts had settled on Lots 26 and 27 of the 4th Concession of Lancaster Township. (These Stewarts are sometimes referred to as the Lancaster Stewarts, and were closely related to the Stewarts of Stewarts Glen, GC) One of his teachers was Dr Roderick McLeod. William Stewart worked for a Montreal merchant, spent two years at Longueuil, and went to Bytown (later called Ottawa) in the spring of 1827 when the Rideau Canal was in its early stages of construction. He was elected in 1828 to the first Bytown council. Previously a storekeeper and supplier of goods at Bytown for the lumber shanties, in the 1830s he was active in the lumber trade in his own right, maintaining shanties in the Upper Ottawa Valley. He was a member of the House of Assembly for the Province of Canada from 1843 to 1847, representing first Russell and afterwards Bytown. As a member of the House of Assembly, he drafted the bill which incorporated Bytown and set its early town limits. Through problems in the timber trade, he suffered financial difficulties in the late 1840s. In his later years he gave up the lumber business and his store and devoted himself to farming and to the duties involved in being superintendent of the Bytown common school system. William Stewart died during a visit to Toronto. He was a man of influence, wide connections, energy, enterprise, and a strong personal prestige. Besides speaking English and Gaelic fluently, he had picked up a business knowledge of French. He was an extensive property owner in the Bytown area, where he maintained his own farm. A part of Ottawa became known as Stewarton because of the property he owned there. He was active in the Presbyterian Church. The poet Lett honoured him as “A //man// among old Bytown’s men,” and as a parliamentary representative who never “betrayed” his constituents. Stewart was married on 16 April 1838 during a return visit to the Isle of Skye, Scotland, to Catherine Stewart (1818-1900), his cousin once removed and like himself a native of the Isle of Skye. Their nine children included (1) McLeod Stewart, (2) a daughter Williamina, through whose descendants kinship connections were established with the families of the legendary Bytown pioneers Nicholas Sparks and Philemon Wright, and, (3) a daughter who was married to Col. John Macpherson. And also, William Stewart was the brother of Neil Stewart and of Mrs Marion Stewart Mcdonald, and was the great-uncle of another William Stewart, the blind lawyer of Lancaster. ---- Life by R. Forbes Hirsch, //Dictionary of Canadian Biography// VIII, 839-840 * //Campbell (1990)//, 164-217 (a detailed geneal. history of the Lancaster Stewarts) (portrait) * William Pittman Lett, //Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants// (Ottawa 1874) 5-6, 42-43 * Shirley E. Woods, Jr., //Ottawa: the Capital of Canada// (1980) (includes p. 224 list of Ottawa streets named after his children) * John H. Taylor, //Ottawa: an Illustrated History// (1986) 27-28 (portrait) * letter to, and letter from him, printed in //Glengarry Life// (1980) [<6>]