ARCHIBALD, SAMUEL JAMES (1849-1890)

ARCHIBALD, SAMUEL JAMES, Baptist minister, Newcastle field, 1886-88; b. Colchester Co., N.S., 8 Sep 1849, s/o James Archibald and Abigail Whidden; m. 1871, Minerva McLaughlin, of Economy, N.S.; d. Jacksonville, N.B., 29 May 1890.

Samuel J. Archibald was a thirty-one-year-old schoolteacher and an adherent of the Presbyterian church prior to his conversion and acceptance into the Baptist ministry in 1882. After two years as a licentiate he was ordained at New Ross, N.S., in 1884 and was then stationed there as pastor. At the end of 1886 he was called to Newcastle as minister of the Baptist congregation in the town, as well as the congregations at Whitneyville, Little Southwest, and Blackville, which had not enjoyed the services of an ordained clergyman in several years. In May 1887 he preached at Doaktown. In June 1888 he delivered the first sermon in the new Baptist meeting house at Dunphy's Settlement, in Upper Blackville.

Archibald was "a man of excellent mental attainments." He did not abandon his interest in the field of education when he left the classroom, and in 1887 he addressed the Teachers' Institute on "Language Lessons." He was much respected in the Baptist community both as a preacher and a temperance worker, but after only a year and nine months on the field he accepted an invitation to the church at Jacksonville, in Carleton County. He and his family settled there in September 1888, and he died there, at age forty, in May 1890 of a respiratory ailment which had kept him bedridden most of the previous winter. Regret was expressed in the minutes of the next Baptist convention that a "good man" was fallen "in the prime of early manhood." He was survived by his wife, Minerva McLaughlin, and five children."