MCCURDY, JOHN (1808-1868)

MCCURDY, JOHN, first minister, St John's Presbyterian Church, Chatham, 1831-68; b. Onslow, N.S., 17 Mar 1808, s/o James McCurdy and Agnes Archibald; m. 1835, Catherine Thomson, d/o James Thomson and Catherine MacKay; d. Chatham, 1 Jan 1868.

John McCurdy was a member of an outstanding family which had been settled in the Truro area in Nova Scotia since the 1760s. He was educated and trained for the ministry at Pictou Academy and Divinity Hall, where he finished the rigorous seven-year program in 1831, at age twenty-three. He came to Chatham in August of that year in response to a request placed with the Pictou Presbytery by those Chatham Presbyterians who did not want a 'Kirk' minister as successor to the Rev. James Thomson.

By the time McCurdy arrived the Secessionist and Kirk factions within the congregation were vying for control of St Andrew's Church. The Kirk members claimed that it belonged to them, but the Secessionists had the keys. When they attempted to enter, however, they were barred from doing so and had to hold their services elsewhere. Actions and counteractions ensued, until the Kirk party "hired an armed force of six or eight men" and placed them upstairs in the church, "with stoves, dishes, cooking utensils and provisions, to stand a siege if necessary." At this point the Secessionists conceded defeat and decided to erect a new church. St John's Church was thus built, and opened on 19 August 1832.

McCurdy was ordained at Chatham in August 1831 and married there in 1835 to a daughter of his predecessor. He devoted his entire ministry to St John's, preaching each Sunday for thirty-six years, in "a great and solemn voice." During this period, he officiated at 809 baptisms and 329 funerals. At most times he enjoyed cordial relations with his congregation, but if he needed to be firm, he could be exceedingly so. When a petition was circulated in 1847 demanding that he permit Presbyterian ministers other than those with whom he was aligned to preach on a guest basis, he engaged the sympathies of his supporters, house-to-house, and turned most of the signers of the petition against those who had conceived of it. As described in an appendix to James Hannay's History of New Brunswick, he also handled a comic opera situation most deftly in 1866, after the synod of Nova Scotia decreed the use of instrumental music in church to be unscriptural.

McCurdy was one of the founders of the Miramichi Sabbath School Society in 1832 and was elected as its first president. He was also a member from an early date of the Miramichi Temperance Society and was its president in 1835-36. In 1843 he was appointed to the County Board of Education, which assessed applications for teachers' licenses, and he succeeded the Rev. James Souter as secretary of the board. From the 1840s until at least 1860 he was a trustee of the County Grammar School. He was always in demand as a public speaker, notably by the Mechanics' institutes at Chatham and Newcastle. He addressed the Chatham Mechanics on "Gravitation" (1847), but his theme was usually educational, as in "The Benefit of Knowledge" (1848), "The Cultivation of the Mind and its Bearing on the Practical Purposes of Life" (1850), and "Discipline of the Heart and Mind" (1866).

In 1865 McCurdy was granted an honorary DD degree by Monmouth College, a United Presbyterian institution in Monmouth, Illinois. In 1867 he and his wife, Catherine Thomson, visited Scotland, where she had been born, at Chapelhill, Auchtergaven, Perthshire, fifty-two years previously. Throughout his ministry, and until her own death in 1899, she was a major force in the congregation. "There was not an enterprise of the church which a woman could take part in," stated the Miramichi Advance, that she did not "forward with all her resources of hand, mind, and heart." She was the leader for many years of the Miramichi Ladies' Bible Society and had a key role to play in the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Although she was a person of "singular energy and fervor of spirit," she was also "clear-sighted and practical."

Besides his wife, McCurdy was survived in 1868 by three daughters and his two sons: John McCurdy Jr and J. Frederick McCurdy.