MARSHALL, THOMAS (1851-1941)

MARSHALL, THOMAS, Methodist minister, Chatham circuit, 1890-93; b. Screveton, Nottingham, England, 3 Jan 1851, s/o Edward Marshall and Sarah Green; m. 1876, Anne E. Baird, of Woodstock (a d/o William T. Baird, the author of Seventy Years of New Brunswick Life); d. Montreal, 1 May 1941.

Thomas Marshall was educated in England and was one of twelve young men who landed in Halifax in October 1871 with the intention of joining the Eastern Conference of the Methodist church. Also numbered among the twelve were Robert S. Crisp, G. Wells Fisher, and William Harrison.

Marshall was admitted to the ministry on trial soon after his arrival and served part of his probation at Boiestown. Ordained in 1874, he worked in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, most of his assignments being in towns and cities. Five of his pastorates were in Saint John, which is where he was based before being appointed to Chatham in 1890.

Marshall was one of the best-known prohibitionists of his time, and while stationed on the Miramichi he became embroiled in a public controversy over the enforcement of the Canada Temperance Act. The fact that a missile came through a window of his house one night "and passed dangerously close to his head" did not impede his efforts. David G. Smith, the feisty editor of the Miramichi Advance, who was not a temperance advocate, found himself a target of both Marshall and his predecessor, the Rev. Robert S. Crisp. "Solid sense and broad Christian charity," Smith claimed, had been "entirely omitted from the equipment" of those two men. He resented so much "the uncultured personal references" which Marshall made to him that he devoted at least four editorials to debunking him.

From Chatham, Marshall went to Woodstock, and then returned to Saint John. Between 1908 and 1912, he served as superintendent of Methodist missions for New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland. He returned to the pulpit in Fredericton in 1914 and then took another church in Saint John prior to his retirement in 1922. In 1929, he moved to Montreal. "A keen cricketer," he attended "every game scheduled" in the city in the 1940 season even though he was nearing his ninetieth birthday. He and his wife, Anne E. Baird, had two daughters.