- DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Stanley Brice Frost and Robert H. Michel, “MACDONALD (McDonald), Sir WILLIAM CHRISTOPHER,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 14, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/macdonald_william_christopher_14E.html
- DCB profile notes:
- Merchant, tobacco manufacturer, and philanthropist; b. 10 Feb. 1831 in Glenaladale, P.E.I., youngest son of Donald McDonald and Anna Matilda Brecken; d. unmarried 9 June 1917 in Montreal.
- William Macdonald’s paternal grandfather, John MacDonald of Glenaladale, a Roman Catholic, was the last of a line of Scottish lairds bearing the title Glenaladale. In 1772 he transported over 200 Highlanders to St John’s (Prince Edward) Island, where he had purchased 20,000 acres of farm land. His son Donald, who became a highly controversial landlord and a legislative councillor, married Anna Matilda Brecken, the daughter of a prominent Protestant landowner and the sister of John Brecken.
- Macdonald quarrelled with his father but remained devoted to his mother. Unlike his brothers John Archibald and Augustine Ralph, who were sent to their father’s Catholic alma mater, Stonyhurst College in England, William was educated at Central Academy in Charlottetown. At 16 he was apprenticed, apparently unwillingly, to a cousin on his mother’s side who kept a general store in Charlottetown. By age 18 he was clerking with his brother Augustine in a commercial establishment in Boston, George H. Gray and Company. Soon he engaged in commerce on his own account. In 1849 he asked his father for financial backing, failing which he threatened to join the gold-rush in California. He raised capital somehow, for in 1851 he persuaded his brother John to turn from farming to storekeeping in Charlottetown; he would be the partner abroad.
- In 1857 the brothers appeared in the Montreal directory as importers and general commission merchants. By the following year they were McDonald Brothers and Company, “manufacturers of tobacco.” They bought the tobacco in leaf from Kentucky and elsewhere, cured it, and processed it for chewing or for consumption by pipe (not until 1922, after William’s death, did the company begin the large-scale manufacture of cigarettes). Shortly after 1866 McDonald Brothers and Company was dissolved and Macdonald was operating under his own name.
- Macdonald’s first tobacco factory was on Water Street (Rue de la Commune) in Montreal. By 1871 it employed over 500 persons. As at other tobacco factories, women and adolescents, hired cheaply, made up over half of the workforce and did much of the stripping, sorting, and drying of tobacco plants.
- In 1898 Macdonald, after initially declining the honour, had received a knighthood. From that time on he signed his name Macdonald. He was embarrassed by his connection with the tobacco trade from which he derived his profits. Also, his family connections had now been severed. So changing the spelling of his name may have had both conscious and unconscious motivations. In 1914 he followed Lord Strathcona as chancellor of McGill. That same year Macdonald’s assistant David Stewart was stricken with paralysis and soon afterwards, on 25 Aug. 1914, Macdonald made his will. He died almost three years later. He left nothing to his relatives. His business, estimated to net $750,000 a year and to be worth $20,000,000, went to Stewart’s sons Walter Moncrief and Howard, who had long served in the company. Walter Moncrief Stewart, and later the Macdonald Stewart Foundation, continued Macdonald’s extraordinary philanthropy to McGill, education, and many other causes. Macdonald left $25,000 each to his McGill friends, Principal William Peterson and bursar Walter Vaughan, and to his factory supervisor, Samuel Wells. He ordered his body cremated without religious observances in the crematorium he had presented to the Mount Royal Cemetery in 1901. He left $1,000,000 to Macdonald College, $500,000 to the faculty of medicine at McGill, $300,000 to the McGill Conservatorium of Music, $500,000 to the Montreal General Hospital, and $100,000 to the crematorium company.
- Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=844
- Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/108259708/william-christopher-macdonald
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