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Dictionary of Miramichi Biography

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BACON, SAMUEL (1789-1869)

BACON, SAMUEL, Anglican missionary and rector, Chatham, 1822-69; b. Westminster (London), England, c1789, s/o John Bacon and Martha Holland; m. 1822, Eliza Hicks Cutler, of Annapolis, N.S.; d. Chatham, 16 Feb 1869.

Samuel Bacon was a son of the second marriage of the English sculptor, John Bacon the elder, RA, one of whose best-known works is the statue of Dr Samuel Johnson in St Paul's Cathedral. He was only ten years old when his father died in 1799, at age fifty-nine. He was educated at Clare College, Cambridge (BA 1816), and privately tutored in theology in London. He was ordained a deacon in 1818 by the bishop of Ely, and a priest in 1819 by the bishop of London, at Fulham Chapel Palace.

In 1821 Bacon was a single man of thirty-two. Any inheritance which he had received from his father was long since spent, and he was deeply in debt. It was in these circumstances that he offered his services to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and agreed to be sent to the New Brunswick mission field. His appointment had effect from July 1821, and he made an arrangement to assign part of his annual salary to his creditors in England.

Bacon was the first Anglican missionary to settle on the Miramichi, his only predecessors having been a shadowy Rev. John Jones, who applied for a grant of land and spoke of establishing a mission in 1792, and the Rev. John Burnyeat, who as elsewhere noted, made a purposeful and productive seven-week visit in the summer of 1820.

Bacon arrived late in 1821 or during the first two weeks of January 1822. No church awaited him, and for the first few years services were conducted in the courthouse in Newcastle and in a schoolhouse on the Chatham side of the river. About a year after his arrival, on 13 December 1822, he was married to Elizabeth Hicks Cutler in a civil ceremony conducted by Alexander Davidson, JP. His wife, who was a few years his senior, and thus in her mid thirties at the time of their marriage, was a daughter of Ebenezer Cutler, JP, prothonotary for Annapolis Co., N.S.

Bacon oversaw the construction of St Paul's Church at Chatham Head, for which the cornerstone was laid in 1823, but he is not known to have played any part in its design or construction. His ministry was based at this church throughout, but in the earlier period he also preached and administered the sacraments at far-flung locations, from Richibucto to Restigouche, and Escuminac to Nashwaak. He first visited Ludlow in the spring of 1823 and remained in charge of the congregation there until 1839. In 1827, for instance, he made two one-day visits, as well as a four-day visit, during which he baptized sixty-five persons and solemnized a number of marriages. He was more frequently at Bay du Vin, where he encouraged the construction of the Church of St John the Evangelist in 1827. He was later relieved by his assistants: Archibald Gray until 1833, and James Hudson from 1834 onward.

Bacon took on regular pastoral responsibility for a second church in 1837, when St Mary's Chapel was erected in Chatham, but the bulk of the long-distance travel fell to Rev. Mr Hudson, who soon took up the duties of a new appointment as visiting missionary for the Miramichi. Bacon acquired certain other travel obligations in 1847, however, when he was made one of the first rural deans of the province, with a territory which covered most of northeastern New Brunswick.

Bacon was an important educational force on the Miramichi. From soon after his arrival he was one of the most active of the Chatham parish school trustees, and in 1827 he was appointed a director of the County Grammar School. His term of service to this school, which lasted from the 1820s until the 1860s, was unparalleled, and his influence was directly felt, inasmuch as the school was taught for many years under the aegis of the Anglican parish. In 1843 he was appointed to the County Board of Education, which assessed the merits of applicants for teachers' licenses. He had also been made a member, in 1833, of the first County Board of Health.

Bacon is judged to have been a success both as pastor and church administrator. Strength and gentleness were combined in him in an effective way. This became apparent in the 1840s when he stoutly defended the Rev. Mr Hudson against powerful interests within the church which were demanding his removal and was yet able to preserve satisfactory personal relationships with almost all of those involved.

A unique description of Bacon in his old age, as he made his regular rounds, is given in "Memories of the Miramichi," the Catholic author of which - Father William C. Gaynor - was only fourteen years old when Bacon died. "Father Bacon," he wrote, "went usually afoot, but sometimes in the most dilapidated, wheezy vehicle you can imagine, and with a horse so fat and lazy that you wondered how the kind old cleric could ever reach anywhere. He wore a cassock and low crowned hat, and he was so gentle and kindly, at once so fatherly and helpless in appearance."

Bacon's wife, Elizabeth H. Cutler, died in 1852. At that time his daughter and only child, Eliza Lovibond Bacon, and her husband, William Wilkinson, were living with him, and when they acquired the former Thomas H. Peters house in 1862, he moved there with them. In an article on the house which was published in Acadiensis in 1903 it was stated that the Wilkinson family owned "an excellent bust of the late Rector, taken by his brother, John Bacon." This was a work of his half-brother, John Bacon the younger, and it was sculpted while Bacon was on leave in England for health reasons in 1836. Another family possession was a portrait of Bacon's mother with an infant in her arms, painted around 1790. There was also "a gorgeous and capacious ladies' Chinese cloak" to be seen at the house. This was a gift from Sir Rutherford Alcock, a former British envoy in Shanghai, and his wife Henrietta Bacon, who was a niece of the rector.

Sources

[m] NB Courier 23 Jan 1823 [d] Gleaner 18 Feb 1869 / Acadiensis III/2 (April 1903); DNB (re. John Bacon, the elder); Francis research; Gleaner 28 Jun 1836, 26 Dec 1837, 22 Nov 1843; Lee, G.; Memories; Spray (DK)


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