(7 Sept. 1826-22 Oct. 1896), physician, militia officer, political figure. Born in York (Toronto). A graduate in medicine from McGill in 1847, he made Cornwall, Ont., his home for the remainder of his life. He was MP (constituency: Cornwall , afterwards Cornwall-Stormont) for most of the period from 1872 till his death. In his parliamentary contests, he was twice defeated by one of the Sandfield brothers, Alexander Francis Macdonald, both times in 1874, and he himself twice defeated another Glengarrian, Donald Ban Maclennan, in 1878 and 1880. He began his career as a Liberal, later becoming a Conservative. He never achieved the cabinet post to which his abilities might be assumed to have entitled him, but in the Northwest Rebellion, 1885, he was Canada’s surgeon general of the militia. As an active, remarkably progressive-minded community leader, he must be assumed to have had an influence well beyond Cornwall, but we may assume that it was through his long and distinguished career in the militia that his influence was greatest on GC history. The 59th Stormont and Glengarry Battalion, of which he was lieutenant-colonel, was one of the predecessors of the SDG Highlanders regiment. Darby Bergin died in Cornwall. Roman Catholic. He was never by any standard definition a Glengarrian, but GC could claim him in death, for he is buried in the county, at the Precious Blood cemetery, Glen Walter, on the St. Lawrence shoreline.

Life by Charles G. Roland, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, XII, 94-97 * Johnson (1968) * Boss, 45-53, 247, 249