CARTER, JOHN (1844-1924)

CARTER, JOHN, Catholic missionary, Renous, 1877-84; b. Newcastle, 26 Oct 1844, s/o Francis Carter and Mary Ryan; ordained 1868; d. Chatham, 31 May 1924.

John Carter was the son of an Irish shoemaker who immigrated to the Miramichi in 1841. He studied at the Newcastle Grammar School under John Hardie and at St Michael's male academy in Chatham. He was trained in theology at the Grand Seminary in Montreal and was the first native of Newcastle to be ordained a Catholic priest.

Carter served as a curate at Bathurst Village and elsewhere in the Chatham diocese before succeeding Father William Morriscy in 1877 as resident priest at Renous. While stationed there he attended the Red Bank mission, as well as the mission at Boiestown, where his predecessor had erected a chapel in 1874.

In 1884 Carter was appointed to the parish of Petit Rocher in Gloucester County, and he was the priest there during the next thirty-seven years. He was said to have been of "strong character, excellent scholarship, and pleasing personality." Some of the qualities of his mind and heart are revealed in an address which he delivered at the dedication of the new convent school in Newcastle in November 1895, the text of which was published in the Miramichi Advance.

Carter retired due to illness in 1921. He was within a few months of his eightieth birthday when he died at the Hotel Dieu Hospital in Chatham in 1924.