(15 Aug. 1777-1845 or 1846), farmer, figure of legend. Born in New York colony. Parents: Alexander McIntosh and his wife whose Christian name was Juliet. John McIntosh’s father settled near Harpersfield in New York colony in 1773. The date is, of course, also that of the voyage of the Pearl, so important in GC history, so possibly the father was one of the emigrants on the Pearl. John McIntosh came to Canada in the mid-1790s or a little later, settling in Dundas County. The original McIntosh apple tree was a seedling John McIntosh or (as some accounts say) his son Allan McIntosh found growing wild on the McIntosh property in Dundas County–land that John McIntosh had obtained in a trade of land with J. G. Harkness’ great-grandfather. Allan McIntosh certainly played a part in developing the popularity of the apple. The place of growth of the famous tree was Dundela–not far from the clinic Dr Mahlon Locke later had at Williamsburg.

     John McIntosh was married to Hannah Doran or Dorin. (eleven children) An article on Jonathan Muchmore, one of the U E Loyalist settlers of GC, states that “a few years” after Muchmore’s death in 1787 by drowning , “his widow married Major Benjamin MacIntosh, U. E., who had come with Muchmore from the Mohawk wars. The MacIntosh red apple was named after this MacIntosh.” This, of course, is based on a mistaken assumption about the identity of the McIntosh who gave his name to the apple. Otherwise, the McIntoshs of the apple touch on GC insofar as the famous apple has produced part of the lore and legend of Eastern Ontario. John MacDougall wrote in his Rural Life in Canada (1913), “In its native home, Eastern Ontario, this fine variety [the McIntosh apple] attains an excellence which it reaches nowhere else; and here it should be largely grown.” (p. 104) In the same year E. S. Reeves, in his Orchard Survey of Dundas, Stormont and Glengarry, based largely on the orchards of the front concessions of SDG, wrote that “This is the home of the McIntosh Red apple, and nowhere in the world is it grown to better perfection and of better quality.” In recent times, with the McIntosh Apple computer, the apple has achieved, worldwide, a new kind of fame.

Life by Robert L. Fraser, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, VII, 563-564 * Harkness 555-560 (with illustr.) * Bibliography of Glengarry:, for McIntosh Apple * Mary Mutchmore, “Jonathan Muchmore, U. E.,” The United Empire Loyalists’ Association, 8: Annual Transactions 1917-1926 (Toronto, 1927), 109-117 (surnames spelled thus)