(18 April 1876-11 Feb. 1948), author. (John E. McIntosh, J. E. McIntosh, John McIntosh, Johnnie McIntosh, though this comes perhaps just from a pronunciation of John E., “Sandy Fraser”) Born on his parents’ farm, which was on S1/2 of Lot 14, 9th Concession of Lochiel Township, Breadalbane. GC. Parents: Peter McIntosh (d. 1910) and his wife Elizabeth Charlotte Everett (d. 1901). Formal education: limited to the local primary school. He worked winters in Quebec as a scaler or measurer of logs, and he visited western Canada on the harvest excursions, as a farm worker. Otherwise, apart from holiday trips, he spent his entire adult life as a farmer on the family farm at Breadalbane. According to his brother Prof. D.C. MacIntosh he “had generously given up the opportunity of a higher education in order that the younger members of the family might have that chance.” (He and D. C. Macintosh used different spellings of their surname.)

     John E. began to contribute to The Farmer’s Advocate in 1909 under the pen name of “Sandy Fraser.” The Sandy Fraser writings became a regular column in 1917. For the rest of McIntosh’s life his Sandy Fraser column was a standard feature in The Farmer’s Advocate –much read and much loved by large numbers of farm people. For many Canadian farm people, GC meant the place where “Sandy Fraser” lived, and about which Ralph Connor (C. W. Gordon) and Sandy Fraser had written. Living quietly on his Eastern Ontario farm (where he had neither electricity or telephone), J. E. McIntosh created for himself a double life by reinventing himself over the years as a figure in fiction, in the form of the coloUrful, witty, philosophical, emotionally and intellectually substantial Sandy Fraser, a figure both unsettlingly improbable and richly human. The Sandy Fraser columns were his greatest achievement, and it was on these that his reputation with the public principally rested. But McIntosh also wrote under the pen name of “Sam Brown” for Farm and Dairy and under the name of “Rusticus” for The Canadian Countryman and under his own name for The Ottawa Farm Journal. Departing from his familiar farm interests, he wrote articles on Scottish clans and the history of Scotland for the Glengarry News in 1925 and 1932-1933. The Sandy Fraser column was written in Scottish dialect; otherwise McIntosh wrote in standard English. A master of prose while writing under his guise of Sandy Fraser and a superb describer of the old-style Ontario farming, McIntosh never broke through into book publication or the wider forms of literary fame.

     He visited Britain and Europe in 1925. Besides being a successful farmer with a Holstein herd, he owned the local cheese factory, which was situated on his farm, and he also briefly owned another cheese factory. Occasionally he made his farm available for public purposes, as when the Holstein Breeders of Glengarry County held their field day there on 18 June 1935. Municipal politics he followed with interest. He was nominated for reeve of Lochiel for the year 1931 but withdrew before voting took place, whereupon J. A. McCrimmon was returned as reeve by acclamation. (Cornwall Freeholder 22 & 26 Nov. 1930) John E. McIntosh died at Dr MacDonald’s hospital, Vankleek Hill. (Dr Alexander Macdonald). McIntosh never married. At a time when cremation was rare for Glengarrians, he was cremated and the ashes were buried in the McIntosh family cemetery on his farm.

     Though he was somewhat more prosperous than the average GC farmer, it was he who left an incomparable record of the hard lives and often complaining mentality of the old-time “ordinary farmers,” who belonged to the age before big farming came to GC, and when the few prosperous quality farmers, a fair number of whom are included in the present dictionary, were sharply marked off in status from most of their professional brothers in the concessions.

     Gloomy though his writings often were, he remained, essentially, a man of progress and optimism, and was willing to believe or hope that “this auld warld, poorly handled and badly shot to pieces as it is, is slowly changing for the better and will some day be a decent and comfortable place in which to spend seventy-five or eighty years o’ one’s life.” (Farmer's Advocate 26 Jan. 1939) In a rhetoric which borrowed its phraseology from the forceful language of daily life and illustrations from the hard experiences of farming, McIntosh returned often to his favourite argument that life is a “school” in which we are gradually educated for existence at a higher level in the next life.

     For Glengarry farm writers, see also C. G. McKillican. At least one other GC-area farmer, Duncan Norman Morrison (28 June 1899-24 Jan. 1994), of Dalhousie Mills, is stated to have written articles in the 1920s for the Farmer’s Advocate and the Canadian Countryman.

Biog. article by Royce MacGillivray on McIntosh in GHS Annual Volume 13 (1973) and sources stated there * Royce MacGillivray, ed., “Sandy Fraser”: a Bibliography (1991); includes an introduction with appraisal and biog. sketch; a selection of material in this bibliography closely relevant to GC history is reprinted in Bibliography of Glengarry * Bibliography of Glengarry: index and passim, for writings by and about McIntosh * files on John Everett McIntosh & D. C. Macintosh assembled by Royce MacGillivray and now (largely) in collection of Glengarry Historical Society, at Williamstown * obituaries VKHR 12 Feb. 1948, Glengarry News 13 Feb. 1948, Farmer's Advocate 26 Feb. 1948, also obituary tribute by William D. Reid Farmer's Advocate 11 March 1948 & VKHR 18 March 1948 * MacGillivray & Ross 543 (portraittrait) & index * private information * photog. of his cheese factory, GN 10 June 1987 * Holstein Field Day, Standard Freeholder 21 June 1935 ; see also entry for G. S. H. Barton * Morrison: obituary GN 16 March 1994; cf also Allan McDiarmid in index to the Sandy Fraser Bibliography