BILL, INGRAHAM EBENEZER JR (1836-1907)

BILL, INGRAHAM EBENEZER JR, Baptist minister, Newcastle field, 1883-86; b. Nictaux, N.S., 8 Apr 1836, s/o the Rev. Ingraham Ebenezer Bill Sr and Isabella Lyons; m. 1869, Eleanor Pyke, of England; d. Toronto 1 Sep 1907.

Ingraham E. Bill Jr was the son and namesake of the well-known Baptist clergyman who was editor of the Christian Visitor for twenty years and author of the book entitled Fifty Years with the Baptist Ministers and Churches of the Maritime Provinces of Canada (1880).

Bill Jr did not take to either religion or education as a boy, and at age sixteen he left in a sailing ship with an older brother to seek his fortune in Australia. After he had tried his hand at different occupations there and in New Zealand, he was drawn back to religion by the preaching of a Presbyterian minister. This caused him to return to New Brunswick and resume his schooling, with an aim to entering the ministry. After attending Horton Academy and the Baptist Seminary in Fredericton, he went to England for theological training. He was married in Maidstone, England, in 1869, at age thirty-three, and later the same year he was ordained at St Andrews, N.B.

Bill had pastorates at St Andrews and Woodstock and also ministered for a time in the United States. He came to the Miramichi from North Vassalboro, Me, in 1882. During his pastorate at Newcastle he was credited with "resusitating a weak interest" in the church and with organizing "the first Baptist Young People's Society in the Maritime Provinces." He joined with the youth of the church in staging an elaborate "musical cantata of Santa Claus" at Christmas in 1883.

When Bill resigned in 1886 he went to West Yarmouth, N.S. He was later the minister at Liverpool and then moved to Ontario. He retired from the pulpit in 1896 but maintained a connection with Toronto's Bloor Street Baptist Church. During the last five years of his life he was the visiting Baptist minister to the Toronto hospitals. He and his wife, Eleanor Pyke, had a daughter, Issa Bill, who was a talented vocalist and organist, and a son, Ingraham E. Bill III, who began preaching at age thirteen. "The boy preacher," as Bill III was known, later graduated from Acadia University and became a Baptist minister in the United States.