(1825-14 Dec. 1914; age at death, 89 years, 10 months), merchant. Born in Williamstown, GC. Harkness says that he “started as a merchant in South Lancaster, later moving to the upper village [now known as Lancaster] after the building of the Grand Trunk Railway.” McNaughton became the first reeve of the aforementioned upper village after it was officially incorporated as the village of Lancaster in Oct. 1887, and he remained reeve to 1896 except for 1892, and he was warden of SDG for 1895. He was married to Jane Robertson (d. 30 Oct. 1897, aged 71), from the North Branch, near Martintown. They were Protestants, presumably Presbyterians, and are buried in St. Andrew’s cemetery, Willliamstown. Five sons, three of whom survived their parents.

     A. W. McDougald, in his notable history of GC published in the Glengarry News, mentions Donald McNaughton among the merchants of Lancaster in the happy days when that village’s lucky possession of a Grand Trunk Railway station gave it a near monopoly of GC’s railway trade before the Canada Atlantic was built through the northern part of the county in the early 1880s. “Here [at Lancaster] flourished a number of very substantial trading firms– Macpherson & Alexander, Duncan and George McBean and brothers. Large general merchants were William and David McPherson and Donald McNaughton. It was no uncommon spectacle on a crisp winter’s morning for these traders to find a queue of farmers’ sleighs a half mile or more in length lined up upon the Military Road laden with the produce of the North Country from as far distant as Caledonia, Skye, Dunvegan, Scotch River and even from Vankleek Hill.” (Glengarry News 27 Jan. 1933) McDougald also notes the desertion of Lancaster by its substantial merchants once the northern part of GC got its own rail services through the Canada Atlantic and, a little later, the Canadian Pacific. (So far as has proved feasible, the lives of the merchants named here by McDougald have been traced in the present dictionary.)

     Previous to his retirement from business about ten years before his death, McNaughton operated a store in South Lancaster, but it is not clear now what relationship this store had to his earlier mercantile career. The Bradstreet printed credit listings of July 1890, which distinguished between Lancaster the incorporated village and South Lancaster, showed him still as a general merchant at the incorporated village.

Glengarry News 18 Dec. 1914 * Harkness 472 & 474 (portrait) * Ross, Lancaster, 189, 211 * apparently no headstone, but cf. Fraser, Gravestones, I, 130, and Whyte, i, 308 * obituary of his wife, GN 5 Nov. 1897 * Ross & Fraser McNaughtons, I, 327 ff