CAMPBELL, GEORGE MEIKLE (1852-1918)

CAMPBELL, GEORGE MEIKLE, Methodist minister, Newcastle circuit, 1878-79; b. Wallace, N.S., 26 Sep 1852, s/o Duncan Campbell and Margaret McIntosh; m. 1879, Edith S. McKeown, d/o Hezekiah McKeown and Elizabeth Smithson Harrison; d. Hornell, N.Y., 25 Dec 1918.

George M. Campbell was educated at Mount Allison College and ordained a Methodist minister in 1876. Before that he served for a time as a probationer at Nashwaak and Boiestown, which was a difficult part of the field to staff. After his ordination he was the minister for two years at Kingsclear. He accepted assignment to Newcastle in 1878, as successor to Edward Jenkins, who was evidently not an ordained minister. Soon after his arrival it was announced that a Methodist church was about to be erected at English Settlement, where there had been a body of Methodist worshippers for about fifty years.

Newcastle had become a separate Methodist circuit in 1875, but until a parsonage was erected eleven years later, the pulpit was often filled by single men, such as Campbell, who took room and board in the town. When he departed in the summer of 1879 he went to Charlottetown and was married there that fall.

Campbell was a prominent figure in the temperance movement, being grand worthy patriarch of the Sons of Temperance of New Brunswick in 1888. In 1905, after nearly thirty years in the ministry, he was appointed secretary of the Canadian Bible Society, based in Saint John. In 1908 he was granted an honorary DD by Mount Allison University, and in 1911 he was appointed to the chair in homiletics and practical theology at the university. The next year, he was named principal of Mount Allison Ladies' College. During World War I he was granted leave of absence to work for the Canadian government. He was still in this service when he died in 1918, at age sixty-six. "He was one of the big men of the church," stated the Chatham World, "and was well known all over the continent as an eloquent preacher and lecturer." He was survived by his wife, Edith S. McKeown, and a daughter.