The MacMillan Homestead

activity must have been very much circumscribed, for with the very strong convictions on the part of godly parents that children, especially girls, should be carefully guarded, and not allowed to make friends outside of their own church and family circle, her life must have been very narrow and provincial. One wonders just what would have happened if it had not been arranged for Frances to go to Monmouth College. One wonders, too, how it was arranged. By the time she was ready for college, the economic condition of the family was at its very worst. Yet what a wonderful stroke of good fortune it was that she got to go. While she did not graduate, she was able to widen the scope of her friends, and to meet her future husband, Thomas Hanna MacKenzie, who later became a very prominent and influential minister of the Gospel. The home which Aunt Fanny and Uncle Tom MacKenzie, as they were affectionately called by their nieces and nephews, established, was a duplicate of the home in which Frances was reared. Its hospitality was warm and generous, as was her intense loyalty to the family. In this she had the fullest cooperation of her husband. There were two sons born in this family, Donald and Malcolm, and they are mentioned here because they were the first grandchildren, who with their father and mother, returned to the farm each summer for a number of years, to spend their vacation. Additional facts concerning this family and the other children of James and Martha Murdock MacMillan, may be secured from a fuller record which has been prepared and is being printed as an appendix to these more personal sketches. But apart from what this particular family may have done in the world, they are affectionately remembered as a very important part of this picture so far as the old MacMillan homestead is concerned. Fred, the second child of James and Martha MacMillan, is also the recipient of a special sketch in the narrative above mentioned, and his career has already been dealt with in part in this present story, but suffice it to say that it is quite possible that even at this earlier period, Fred had his part to perform to see that his sister Frances got to Monmouth College, and even helped to meet her expenses. It might be interesting and instructive to the members of a later generation to be told that the day Uncle Fred left for Monmouth College, the old battered trunk and one not too large at 26

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