The Keswick Ridge United Church can trace its roots back to the descendants of the Mayflower Pilgrims and early Puritans, many of them Loyalists, who originated from Massachusetts and neighbouring colonies during the years 1762 -1784. These early people established settlements along the Saint John River at the present-day communities called Sheffield and Maugerville, New Brunswick. In 1763 they established a Congregational Church in Sheffield. About 1802, some families of these early settlers decided to relocate about thirty kilometers from Sheffield and Maugerville, upstream along the Saint John River, to a higher elevation and where land was fertile: the Keswick Ridge area. […]
Commemorations
Reverend David Smith
Rev. David Smith was born in the parish of Leuchars, County Fife, near St. Andrews, Scotland on July 8, 1732, the ninth of ten children. In the late 1730s, not yet a teenager, David began his studies. In 1749 David Smith was accepted at the University of St. Andrews and undertook his final training for the Burgher ministry under James Fisher, one of the original four, for a periods of four or five years (1752-1756). […]
Reverend Daniel Cock
Reverend Daniel Cock was born at Clydesdale (Scotland) and was ordained minister of Greenock. He was also a professor of divinity at the Associate Synod College. He was elected Moderator in 1755. In August, 1767, he was appointed to America for a year, but did not go. The same year that he arrived in Truro (1770), he returned to Scotland for his family. He was settled in Truro in 1772, and died in 1805. […]
(Annie) May McLachlan
May McLachlan was born in Pipestone, Manitoba, in 1895, on a farm near town. She wrote about the evening she became sure that God was calling her to serve on mission field as she watched the sunset from a hill on the farm. […]
Trinity United Church
Known as the “Brick Church,” Trinity United Church in Charlottetown, PEI has been present as a congregation for 150 years. The congregation can trace its roots back to 1774 when Benjamin Chappell started holding Methodist meetings in his home. The first Methodist Church in Charlottetown was built in 1816 but the congregation grew to the point where a larger church was needed. Trinity United Church is one of only three public buildings present in 1864 that are still standing today. As the Fathers of Confederation walked up the street from the boats that brought them to Charlottetown for the first meeting that led to the formation of Canada as a nation, they walked by this church. […]
Formation of Truro Presbytery
Truro Presbytery is the first regularly formed and oldest Presbytery in Canada. It was first organized in 1786 and still continues its work in the United Church of Canada in 2016. […]
Peter Jones
Peter Jones (1802-1856) or to use his Ojibwe name, Kahkewaquonaby (“Sacred Feathers”), became in 1833 the first ordained Indigenous Methodist minister in what is now Canada. Thanks to him, and to other Aboriginal Methodist workers, a solid First Nations Methodist Church was established in southern Ontario in the 1820s and 1830s. […]
Stella Burry
Stella Annie Burry was born in Greenspond, Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland, on August 11, 1897.
At a time when getting an education was considered secondary for girls, Burry’s mother was insistent that Stella obtain a good education. She attended the Methodist school in Greenspond. […]
Formation of The United Church of Canada
The United Church of Canada is the largest Protestant denomination in Canada. We minister to over 2 million people in about 3,000 congregations across the country. Ours is a rich history closely entwined with the development of Canada itself. […]
Hay Bay Church
Old Hay Bay Church is the oldest Methodist Church in Canada. This rural two-acre property and adjacent graveyard overlook Hay Bay, near Adolphustown, Ontario. It currently stands containing displays and interpreters and is still used for an annual worship service on the fourth Sunday afternoon every August. […]