McDonell, Alan

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Donald Swainson, “MACDONELL (McDonell), ALLAN,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 11, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/macdonell_allan_11E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Lawyer, office-holder, prospector, and pamphleteer; b. 5 Nov. 1808 at York (Toronto), Upper Canada, son of Alexander McDonell (Collachie) and Anne Smith; d. 9 Sept. 1888 at Toronto.
    • Allan Macdonell’s grandfather, also named Allan, was a loyalist officer who settled in Glengarry County in 1784. His father was the first sheriff of the Home District, a member for Glengarry, and after 1831 also a legislative councillor. In York, Allan attended the Home District Grammar School and then studied law. Upon completion of his legal training in the office of Henry John Boulton, he was called to the bar in 1832.
    • By the 1850s Macdonell’s chief passion had become westward expansion, the annexation of the lands of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the destruction of that company’s trade monopoly in the west. In 1851 Macdonell and a group of associates, including his brother Angus Duncan, applied to the Canadian assembly for a charter to build a railway from the Province of Canada to the Pacific. The petition was denied because the promoters had not completed adequate preparatory work: they did not have the agreement of the imperial government which was sovereign in the northwest, of the HBC which governed the area, or of the Indian tribes which inhabited the territory. Moreover they had no capital.
    • This preliminary effort prompted Macdonell to write Observations upon the construction of a railroad from Lake Superior to the Pacific (1851) which, according to the historian Gerald E. Boyce, “for the next ten years served as the text for promoters of the Pacific Railway and Northwest annexation.
  • Son of Proven United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=5263
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/68765488/allan-macdonell