Churubusco Farmer Healer - 1937

More Than 200 Persons in Day Flock To Home of Churubusco Farmer Healer

November 1937

John Laclair, Churubusco healer, with two of his children, 

Harold, 6, and junior, 4.  Junior was his first patient after 

he fell on a hot stove and burned his face severely when

eight months old. There is no scar visible.

Malone [Franklin Co., NY]:  Whether or not John Laclair has "the power" to heal in his hands, as he and many of his neighbors believe, the North Country is fast beating a path to his door.

He lives in Frontier road three miles north of Churubusco in Clinton county and last Sunday this road was blocked with cars parked in front of his humble little cottage as some 218 persons came to be healed by the touch of his hands.  Over this same Frontier road bootleg cars roared in the days of prohibition, but now it is a lovely and peaceful countryside.  From the Laclair dooryard the St. Lawrence valley unrolls for countless miles.  Even on this murky October day the roof of a church in Ormstown, 18 miles away, gleamed and on a bright day Montreal bridge is discernible.  At nights the lights of that city shine brightly.

Laclair, a wiry farmer of 38, clad in overalls and yellow windbreaker, was working on a piece of farm machinery Tuesday.  He also was wearing a week's growth of blue black beard.  In the yard about him were playing, John Jr., 4 and Harold, 6.  Mr. Laclair, quite affable, stopped work to discuss the work that has the countryside talking and wondering, pro and con.

"It was this little feller here," pointing to John, Jr., "who got me started three years ago, altho I had always had the power in my hands.  "Johnnie, he was eight months old, fell on a hot kitchen stove and was burned so bad that pieces of his face flesh stuck to the hot iron.  I took care of him with my own power and look at his face now."  The boy's cheeks were as smooth as any country Cherub's.  

From that healing his fame began to grow and spread and each Sunday now they come from all directions , the halt, the maimed and the blind.  "I get all kinds" he declared simply.  He had worked on 10 already Tuesday morning and there had been 21 there, he said, Monday.  They average around 200 on Sunday and there was one party from Alberta, two women he said.

His own neighborhood is either non-committal or in his favor.  Just recently Amos Recore, who lives two houses away, caught a finger in a hayrake so that it was flattened.  He could not do the evening milk and could not sleep so he went to the Laclair home for treatment.  He slept the rest of the night, so the story goes, and next mornig did his milking.

Another neighbor, John Robare, stepped on a rusty spike and a week later his foot swelled angrily.  He came for the "power" treatment and the swelling subsided and the foot became well.

There are any number of similar stories, of children cured scarless of eczemea, of lame backs and asthma cleared up suddenly, but the two cases that occurred to Laclair himself in visiting Tuesday were quite remarkable it was stated.

An elderly man in Plattsburg suffered a stroke.  He was "tongue tied" Laclair said and his arm and leg useless on one side.  "Next time he came to see me he could talk as well as ever and he had his arm and leg working again altho the knee was stiff because two small cords were dead."

He talked quite simply but there was a suggestion of the mystic about him.  "How does it feel when you are healing some one, is there any sensation? he was asked.  "No, but sometimes it makes the one I am working on feel queer."

"How do you explain it; how do you do it?"  "Just with the power in my hands." was the enigmatic reply.  Then he did amplify it a bit.  He said that he had always possessed the power.  Even when a child he divined happenings like a fortune teller altho he never told fortunes.  "Sometimes when I was a little boy, my father would go thru the snow to my grandfather's over there," pointing thru fields to a home some miles away.  "My mother would get worried after dark and we'd sit there waiting.  All at once I would tell mother that it was alright, that father had started for home.  I could feel it.  An in just the time, about a half hour, he would get here."

Mr. Laclair has fitted up one little room in a chapel effect, it was stated in the neighborhood, but he did not show it. The little farm of 60 acres is quite off the beaten track and only about three-quarters of a mile from the Canadian line.  The healer appeared quite modest about his work and it was explained that no fee is charged altho those whom he treats frequently leave gifts.