WATERHOUSE, JOHN (1838-1917)

WATERHOUSE, JOHN, Methodist minister, Miramichi circuit, 1873-75; b. Heysham, Lancashire, England, 3 Jan1833; m. 1st, 1862, Mary Hannah Fitzwater, and 2nd, 1878, Mary Thomson; d. Cheshire, England, 23 Jan 1917.

John Waterhouse was received into the Methodist ministry in Newfoundland in 1859. Ordained in 1862, he continued there until 1871, when he was appointed to the circuit at Amherst, N.S. After two years, he came to Chatham, where he was the last missionary of the Miramichi Methodist circuit before it was divided into half a dozen smaller units in 1875.

Waterhouse's first wife died in Chatham in June 1875, at age thirty-four, leaving him with five children between fourteen months and twelve years of age. Three months later, he and the children left for England. "I shall always remember Miramichi," he stated in a letter written from West Yorkshire in 1877, "with such feelings as I remember no other circuit."

In the decades that followed, Waterhouse ministered at various locations in England. He was based in his home county of Lancashire in 1901. In 1911, he was living in retirement in Cheshire, where he died six years later, at age eighty-four.