Alexander McArthur [ 1837/1844 (Approx.) - 1917 ]

Alexander McArthur apparently arrived in the village about 1869 from Ops and stayed for 20 years. Lovell’s Province of Ontario Directory for 1871 states that Alexander “bds” [sic, i.e. boards] at the McArthur Hotel1 while the 1871 Census states he was 272 years old. Alexander, the brother3 of Joseph McArthur, acted as the proprietor of the McArthur House when it first opened in December 1874 [CP 25 Dec 1874; 3]. The lease was sold to Robert Rutherford in September 1878 [CP 27 Sept 1878; 2].

In the 1881 Census Alexander is recorded as a 44 year-old, Irish Presbyterian “lumber merchant”. When he left the village in September 1889 for the “old homestead farm in Ops”, his career was described as “by turns hotel-keeper, shingle manufacturer and lumberman” [FFG 4 Oct 1889: 4]. Upon the death of his brother Joseph in 1892, he was living in Lindsay [FFG 9 Dec 1892; 4]. In his obituary it states that he moved to Saskatchewan about 1907 to be near his son, but died in Toronto August 31st, 1917, having reached the ripe old age of four score years [FFPL 17.17].