CUSHING, JOHN H. (1854-1905)

CUSHING, JOHN H., Catholic priest, Blackville, 1896-97; b. Grand Anse, N.B., c1854, s/o John Cushing and Elizabeth Hayes; d. 15 Nov 1905.

John H. Cushing was a grandson of Robert Cushing and Catherine O'Brien, immigrants from Ireland who settled in the Grand Anse area of Gloucester County in the early 1820s. He grew up on a farm at Grand Anse, the youngest of five or more children whose mother died before 1861. He later attended St Michael's College in Toronto and was ordained a Catholic priest at Grand Anse in 1889.

After his ordination Cushing was admitted to the diocese of Denver in Colorado. He was described as a "temporary sojourner" in the Chatham diocese in August 1896 when he was assigned as the first resident priest of the newly-erected parish of Blackville. Father Edward S. Murdoch had been responsible for building St Raphael's Church at Blackville in 1892, but Cushing took credit for finishing it in the fall of 1896. Similarly, Murdoch claimed to have built the first rectory in 1895, but it would appear that much work remained to be done on it and that this too was attended to by Cushing in 1896-97.

Besides the church at Blackville, Cushing had pastoral responsibility for the missions at Howards and Boiestown. In his first year little information concerning him made its way into the record, but by the summer of 1897 his mental stability was very much in question. He was notified that he should conclude his pastoral work around the first of September to make way for Father Simon J. Crumley to be installed as his successor. However, when Crumley came in October, Cushing was still there, and he refused to relinquish possession of the rectory, claiming that he had spent $1,800 of his own money on it. He was also angry over not having been assigned to another parish. So while Crumley's household furnishings sat on a railway siding, Cushing engaged in a war of words with church authorities, threatening to appeal to Rome if his demands were not met. "I want justice," he stated in a telegram, "and eighteen hundred dollars, or an ecclesiastical trial before I can give up my parish."

After several weeks of unseemly wrangling Cushing was offered and accepted appointment as priest in his home village of Grand Anse. A year later he was accused of repeating a malicious rumor from the pulpit concerning a young woman of that parish. When he was confronted about it he threatened to shoot anyone who would try to take the parish from him, but Father Thomas F. Barry and others entered the church nonetheless and declared him to be dismissed, over his vociferous protests.

In November 1898 the newspapers carried a report of Cushing's death which was later stated to be fraudulent. Nothing more is known except that, in 1905, a Mary Cushing informed Bishop Thomas F. Barry in a letter written from Bangor, Me, that Father Cushing had died in hospital on 15 November of that year.