James McConnell

1830s–1860s

Born about 1836 near Donaghmore, County Down, Ireland. A linen weaver, he married Anne Jane Todd in 1864 and emigrated to Ontario.

1870s–1880s

Moved his family to a brush farm at Cheam, near Chilliwack, in 1873 and cleared it himself.

1890s

Owned 370 acres by 1892, the year he visited Ireland for the first time since emigrating. His house flooded in 1894.

1900s

Served on the Chilliwack municipal council from 1900 to 1905. Widowed in 1904.

1910s

Toured Ireland and Scotland once more in 1911. Died at his son Josiah's home in Cheam on 22 March 1912.

A Linen Weaver from County Down

James McConnell was born in County Down, Ireland, around 1836 or 1837 (one record gives September 9, 1836), and grew up near Donaghmore, not far from Newry, where he worshiped and sometimes spoke at the local Methodist church. He worked as a linen weaver, and on April 13, 1864, he married Anne Jane Todd at Drumballyroney. That same year the newlyweds crossed to Canada and settled in South Monaghan Township near Peterborough, Ontario, where James worked as a laborer and their family began to grow. He was hard to miss: six foot two, with what one account called an unusually vigorous frame.

West to Chilliwack

In Ontario the McConnells lived beside Donald Gillanders, known to everyone as "Father" Gillanders, and it was Gillanders who drew them west: he secured the family a 160-acre farm in British Columbia's Fraser Valley next to his own. In the fall of 1873 they made the long trip by train across the United States to San Francisco, by steamship up the coast to Victoria, and then by boat to New Westminster and on up the Fraser to Chilliwack, where they spent their first night in the home of pioneer settler Isaac Kipp. Decades later the two families would be joined when James's daughter Sarah Jane married Isaac's son Edgar Allen Kipp.

The farm on Yale Road was raw brush land. James cut down the trees himself and built a log cabin for the family's first home, on land east of Mount Shannon in what became the settlement of Cheam. He stayed on that same property for the rest of his farming life. By 1892 the cabin had given way to a modern two-story, nine-room house, and James owned 370 acres, most of it under cultivation. Chilliwack's McConnell Road is named for him and his family.

Farmer and Fairgoer

James was a proud and successful farmer. In early 1892 he was selling seed (American Banner oats, Mummy peas, and spring wheat), and in September 1894 he carried a bundle of his oats into the Chilliwack Progress office so the paper could admire stalks five and a half feet tall. At the 1895 Chilliwack Fair he took first prize for his Canada Red apples and second prizes for his rough barley and three other kinds of apples.

The land could be hard on him, too. In the great flood of June 1894 the water stood six inches deep on the ground floor, and the family had to live upstairs. A government boat came to move the livestock to higher ground, and after that the family rowed out twice a day to tend them. In 1898 someone shot one of his brood sows in the night, and James took out a newspaper notice asking the culprit to come forward and pay for it. In March 1901 his plow lurched into a hollow and threw him against it, and Dr. Henderson had to put two stitches in his chin.

A Visit Home, 1892

In June 1892, hearing that his parents were in poor health, James set out for Ireland. It was his first trip home since he had emigrated nearly thirty years earlier, and all his brothers and sisters were still living there. A Mr. Knox came along, hoping to find a wife in Ireland. They rode the Canadian Pacific Railway to Montreal, and James made a side trip to Quebec City to see the Parliament buildings before sailing from there on the Allan Line steamer Parisian with some 700 other cabin passengers. The weather was beautiful on the St. Lawrence, but the Atlantic was rough and seasickness was widespread.

After landing at Londonderry, James reached his hometown and asked a man he took for a stranger where he might find his people. The "stranger" was his own brother, who took him straight to their parents' house. His mother had been bedridden for a year, but his father was still in good health. The Methodist church in Donaghmore invited him to speak, and he found it crowded with faces he remembered. He also saw how much had changed. The town where he had married had declined, which he blamed on drink, and many once-wealthy families there had fallen into poverty. The village of Loughbrick had nearly disappeared, while Banbridge had become a booming manufacturing town. He stayed with the best man from his wedding and spent a week at Moyallen, where a lady's garden, with a cement road to a cricket ground and a greenhouse full of peaches, struck him as one of the most beautiful places he had ever been.

Councilor McConnell

James was one of the six trustees of the Chilliwack School in 1877, and by the 1890s he was a fixture at every public meeting on taxes, dikes, railways, and roads. He had firm ideas about paying his way. At an 1897 meeting about ratepayers who had lost the vote over unpaid taxes, he said he had always paid his taxes, even when he was poor, and that anyone eight or nine years behind could fairly lose the right to vote. At the January 1898 nominations his speech was called the "most racy and popular" of the day, met with "shouts of laughter and storms of applause from start to finish."

In January 1899 he ran for the Ward 6 council seat at the urging of his friends and lost to James Armstrong, 42 votes to 26. A year later he won it by a wide margin, and he sat on the council for five years, from 1900 to early 1905. Most of the work was roads. He inspected gravelling jobs and let contracts, ordered planks to repair the dangerous Bell Slough Bridge, and approved gunpowder for pathmasters blasting out stumps, all part of turning a stump-strewn valley into a connected township. He ran unopposed in 1902. In 1903, the first year every voter could vote for every seat, he topped the poll with 235 votes, but in 1904 he held on by only three votes.

His speeches were the stuff of local legend. At the 1904 nominations he was greeted with a roar of applause, took off his overcoat, took a hearty drink, and opened: "Mr. Chairman and gentlemen. I'm sorry I can't say ladies and gentlemen, because there's none here!" When the laughter died down he added, "If I keep you an hour you must excuse me, because I have such a lot of things in my head!" He spoke at length about roads in a voice that echoed around the hall, promised he would not favor Methodists over anyone else, and prompted someone to remark that as a preacher he could easily make himself heard in a church of any size.

He could be prickly as well. He was wary of anything that might raise taxes. In 1901 he called the dyking scheme "a blunder from start to finish," though he had also argued that dikes were necessary for safe and profitable farming. In 1904 the Chilliwack Progress questioned his fitness for office after he spoke in favor of an amendment the tramway company wanted and then voted against it, apparently following fellow councilor Reeves. The amendment failed, and it had been one of the last obstacles to Chilliwack getting a tram line. James answered by asking the council to pass a vote condemning the paper and its editor, Mr. Jackman. His colleagues, wary of stirring up more trouble, declined to support him.

Church, Lodge, and Later Years

James had left the Episcopal church with a group of others to become a Methodist, and he was a devout, and very audible, member of the Methodist church for decades. He sang loudly from the front pew and called out "Amen" after nearly everything the minister said. He was a lay delegate to the Methodist district meeting in 1899, attended the church's conferences in later years, and was an officer of the Oddfellows' Excelsior Lodge No. 7 in the early 1900s. In April 1904 he was a pallbearer at Donald Gillanders's funeral, and that June he spoke at length at a memorial service about how Gillanders and their neighbor Reece had always looked out for him since he came to Canada. His wife Anne Jane died that October, and the council sent the family a letter of condolence.

In his last years James was always on the move. He went to the Methodist camp meetings in Ferndale, Washington, in several summers, once continuing on to Portland and the Seattle exposition. He spent weeks at a time in Victoria, including a visit for the opening of the provincial parliament in 1910, and often stayed with his daughter Martha on Lulu Island. Passing through Vancouver in 1906, he heard General William Booth of the Salvation Army speak and thought him "a wonderful man," and near the end of his life he began working with the Salvation Army himself. When his train was snowbound at Abbotsford in January 1911, he wrote to the local paper to thank the railway, whose cars had "a plentiful supply of food and fuel and we were always warm and comfortable and well fed."

At the Chilliwack Pioneers' Society banquet in December 1910, seated with his daughter Sarah and son-in-law Ed Kipp, he dined on a menu that honored the valley's early days, including "Kipp's apple pie" and a Christmas plum pudding labeled "made in 1875." That fall he had remarked on how much the Chilliwack Fair had changed since its grounds were a stump-strewn drive. In May 1911, at about seventy-five, he set off on one more trip home, by rail to Boston and then on the mail steamer Numidian to Londonderry. He spent the summer in Ireland and Scotland, including a trip up his beloved River Clyde, and was back in Chilliwack by late August.

In March 1912 he fell seriously ill, and his daughter canceled a trip to California and Toronto to come home and nurse him. He died of heart disease, which had troubled him for some years, on March 22, 1912, at the Cheam home of his son Josiah. His funeral went from Josiah's house to the IOOF Cemetery in Chilliwack. His obituary said that "the sturdy and generous characteristics of the Irish were borne out in him."