COLEMAN, WILLIAM A. (1816-1877)

COLEMAN, WILLIAM A., Baptist minister, Whitneyville and Little Southwest, 1848-51, and Newcastle field, 1872-74; b. near Saint John, Nov 1816; m. 1st, 1848, Jane (Whitney) Wheaton, sister of Robert Parker Whitney, and 2nd, 1853, Merinda Hicks, of Sackville, N.B.; d. there, 7 Mar 1877.

William A. Coleman was raised in the Anglican tradition and converted to the Baptist faith at Saint John in 1840. He studied for the ministry under Dr Charles Spurden at the Baptist Seminary in Fredericton and was ordained in the schoolhouse at Rogers Settlement in 1848. His first pastorate, at Whitneyville and Little Southwest, lasted for approximately three years. He had been appointed minister of the Baptist church at Douglas, N.B., before his first wife, Jane (Whitney) Wheaton, died in March 1851, at age thirty-one. Two years later, when his second marriage took place, he was ministering at Sackville. When he returned to the Miramichi in the 1870s his field included the several Baptist congregations on the Northwest and Southwest branches of the river, as well as the church at Newcastle. At the time of his death he was minister of the Second Baptist Church at Sackville.

During his twenty-nine-year ministry Coleman conducted more than a thousand baptisms. In the words of the Baptist historian Edward Manning Saunders, he was "a wise counsellor and sound preacher," who was "zealous for all good works." He was also admired for his executive ability. He and his second wife, Merinda Hicks, were the parents of Henry Hicks Coleman, MD, who was a practicing physician for more than sixty years prior to his death in Moncton in 1937, and one of the leading Baptist laymen in the Maritimes.