(9 Dec. 1834-23 Dec. 1908), publisher. Born in Dumfries Township, Brant County, Ont. Parents: John MacLean and his wife Isabella McRae, both natives of Inverness, Scotland. Alexander MacLean obtained a primary school and grammar school education. To the age of 20 he worked on his father’s farm, then afterwards taught school and worked as a clerk. “He abandoned these pursuits for the newspaper press, to which he had become a casual contributor, and became the publisher, in 1865, of the Cornwall Freeholder, then the home organ of the late Hon. John Sandfield Macdonald, and continued its publisher until shortly after that gentleman’s death, in 1872.” He was therefore the publisher of this paper during John Sandfield Macdonald’s premiership of Ontario. Afterwards, he was Ottawa correspondent of the Toronto Globe for several years, before becoming one of the Parliamentary printers for the government of Canada. Appointed late in life as one of the overseas representatives for Canadian foreign trade (the term trade commissioners was introduced for these in 1907), he served first in Yokohama, Japan, and then briefly, in 1908, in Shanghai, China. He died in Shanghai. Presbyterian. Mason. On 20 Nov. 1863 he was married to Sarah Smith, of Brant County.
As editor-publisher of the lively, combative Freeholder, MacLean was a force in local Liberal politics. And he played a role–all the more important, given that no newspapers were published during this time in GC–in disseminating GC news, and in shaping Glengarrians’ views of themselves and of the world, and preserving a record of GC events. Not all copies of the Freeholder from his period have survived, but a splendid file of the newspaper 1865-1968, discovered in Alexandria in the 1970s, is now preserved in the Ontario Archives.
Cornwall Freeholder 25 Dec. 1908, noticed again 20 Years Ago column, Cornwall Freeholder 26 Dec. 1928 * Rose, ii, 284 (QF) * O. Mary Hill, The Department of Trade and Commerce, 1892-1939 (n.d. ?) 58-59 * Sir Richard Cartwright to Laurier,15 March 1907, commenting unfavourably on MacLean’s role as trade agent in Japan, NAC, Laurier Papers, No. 122457-8, Reel C-846 * entertained by his friends at a supper, CF 21 June 1867