(7 July 1870-15 Jan. 1940), businessman. (N. M. Cantin, Narcisse Cantin) Born on his parents’ farm in Hay Township, Huron County, Ont. Parents: Pierre Cantin and his wife Mathilde Masse. Narcisse Cantin became a cattle dealer in early life, then followed a long, remarkable career as an entrepreneur. He founded and helped develop the village of St. Joseph on the Lake Huron shoreline, promoted the building of a canal link between Lakes Huron and Erie, and a railway linking St. Joseph with Stratford and Sarnia, and finally, for many years he was the diligent promoter of a waterway similar to the 1950s St. Lawrence Seaway. He was a Roman Catholic, of French Canadian origins, and was completely bilingual. He lived variously in Buffalo, St. Joseph, Toronto, and Montreal. He was married at 19 to Josephine Denomme. (ten children) He died at his home in St. Joseph.

     His village St. Joseph did not thrive in the way he hoped, and the canal and railway were never built, but the admirers of this tireless visionary are entitled to be proud of his role as a father of the St. Lawrence Seaway. By one of his suggested routes for the seaway, a canal would have been built from the St. Lawrence in the Cornwall area to the Ottawa River a little west of Hawkesbury cutting through GC. There is a 49-page booklet called Proposed Great Lakes to Ocean $500,000,000. Waterway Improvement and $200,000,000. Hydraulic Development (1919, described as “Second Booklet”), published by the Great Lakes and Atlantic Canal and Power Company, Limited. No author is named on the title page, but the booklet is signed at the end “N.M. Cantin,” who must be taken as its author. In it, a map of Central Canada shows, most interestingly, the route through GC. The Cantin Dry Dock at Montreal presumably bore his name. He was engaged for many years with the Beauharnois Co. as an investor and later a litigant. (For this company and its GC connections, see the entries for W. L. McDougald and W. L. M. King) Cantin may never have visited GC and Glengarrians knew him, if at all, only as name from the national press, but if his national canal had been built through the county, he would have had an inestimable effect on the county. For another major outsider who proposed unsuccessfully to intervene in GC, see the entry for the Hon. William McGillivray.

Biog. study of Cantin in Hay Township Highlights: 150 Years of Diversified Progress 1946-1996 (Zurich, Ont., 1996) 125-136, portrait, illust.; a small map includes the line of the GC-canal * Carleton Mabee, The Seaway Story (1961) 278