KAINE, DAVID CHARLES (1885-1955)

KAINE, DAVID CHARLES, Baptist minister, Whitneyville and Little Southwest, 1923-24; b. Mann Settlement, Que., 28 Aug 1885, s/o David J. Kaine and Elizabeth Gilker; m. 1922, Beatrice Simms, of Doaktown; d. Fredericton, 28 Apr 1955.

David C. Kaine was a railway employee in Campbellton when he was 'saved' at a revival meeting and decided to become a Baptist minister. He had completed a term of study at Acadia University by the summer of 1919, when he was assisting the Rev. Henry E. Allaby with evangelizing work in the Boiestown area. He made 625 pastoral calls that summer and was credited with forty conversions. He later enrolled in the ministerial training program at Gordon Bible College in Boston and was ordained in 1921, at age thirty-six.

During his first pastorate, at Elgin in Albert County, Kaine baptized sixty-five converts in two years. His second pastorate, at Whitneyville and Little Southwest, was brief, but he led a number of persons to 'salvation', including Raymond Whitney, who later played a prominent part in the Baptist church in the Maritimes. In June 1924 he invited the Rev. Crawford P. Wilson of Maugerville to assist him in baptizing twenty converts on the Little Southwest. He reaped praise for having done "wonderful work among the young people" while he was on the field. This included organizing a Baptist Young People's Union at Sillikers.

When Kaine left the Miramichi it was to accept an invitation to South Devon, N.B., where he had a ten-year pastorate. In the late 1930s, while he was ministering at Hartland, he became ill, and from that time onward, he and his family made their home in Fredericton. Although his health was imperfect, he served terms as pastor at Temperance Vale and elsewhere and accepted appointment in the 1940s as New Brunswick "minister at large," under the Baptist home mission board. He was described by the Rev. Henry E. Allaby as "a great man of faith and an earnest winner of souls." He had "a marvellous memory, stated Allaby, "and knew most of the New Testament, perhaps all of it, by heart." He was survived in 1955 by his wife, Beatrice Simms, a son, and two daughters.