(fl. 1830s, 1840s), hotelkeeper. John Grant’s hotel, on St. Henry Street in Montreal, was a centre and headquarters for the Scots. John Fraser, who has an important description of it in his Canadian Pen and Ink Sketches, of 1890, states that it was called an inn or tavern– “the name ‘Hotel’ was not known in those early days.” The tavern was the Montreal gathering place of the Glengarry militiamen in the Rebellion of 1837-1838. There too the Hudson’s Bay Company men met, among them we may assume, more than one Glengarrian. It was also the gathering place for “the Scotch lumberers from the Ottawa.” John Grant’s was also one of the inns or taverns to serve as a terminus for the Glengarry sleigh trade to Montreal. John Sandfield Macdonald maintained his political clubhouse across the street from John Grant’s. Letters from Scotland to emigrant relatives were sometimes sent to Canada c/o John Grant’s. Every Scotch family within a hundred miles of Montreal, in an area “embracing the Scotch counties of Glengarry and Argenteuil, and the Scotch settled parts of Chateaguay,” had personally experienced, John Fraser thought, the hospitality of John Grant’s. As to the host himself, “Not to have known John Grant, or not to have been known by him, was ignorance which no Scotchman of that day would like to acknowledge. Those now living who knew him will never forget his kindly smile and the true Highland greeting of our old host.” It is not known whether he was or was not a Glengarrian, or whether he had GC relatives. John Grant’s seems to have been gone by the time of Lovell’s 1857-1858 Canada Directory. His wife died in Montreal in Aug. 1885, aged 90 (Fraser, p. 66).

John Fraser (QF), 65-70, 123-124, 130-132 * E.C. Guillet, Pioneer Inns & Taverns, I I (1956): directory notices only * E.A. Collard, “John Grant’s’ Tavern and the Glengarry Sleighs,” Glengarry News 26 July 1946, repr. from Montreal Gazette of 15 July