MUNRO, THOMAS MILLEDGE (1838-1916)

MUNRO, THOMAS MILLEDGE, Baptist minister, Newcastle field, 1877-80; b. Caledonia, Queens Co., N.S., 24 May 1838, s/o Valentine Munro and h/w Deborah; m. 1st, 1869, Jane Foster, of Port Medway, N.S., and 2nd, 1885, Mrs. Hannah Soley, of Kentville, N.S.; d. Pennfield, N.B., 14 Jun 1916.

Thomas M. Munro joined the Kempt Baptist Church in Queens Co., N.S., at age twenty and taught school to support his studies for the ministry at Acadia College. He came to Maugerville, N.B., to preach in 1868 when he was thirty years old. He was ministering at Florenceville and Centreville at the time of his ordination in 1869. He was based there and elsewhere on the St John River until 1877, when he accepted a call to the churches at Newcastle and Whitneyville, as successor to Lic. George E. Good, BA. Soon after his arrival he also started to preach in the schoolhouse at Lower Derby, and this encouraged the erection of a Baptist church there in 1880-81. He did not serve on the Little Southwest between 1877 and 1879, as it was included in the Blackville field during those years, on which the Rev. Willard P. Anderson was the minister.

Munro was said to have preached "with much acceptance and to the salvation of many souls," but some of his pronouncements were irksome. In 1879 he objected vociferously to violin music being played at temperance meetings because of its association with "dancing, rum-drinking, card-playing, gambling," and other "evils." In his opinion the music from this instrument tended "to vitiate the moral thoughts and desires of the people, and strengthen a taste for the low and trivial." The Miramichi Advance thought that as strong a case could be made for banning the Bible because of its association with perjury, but his fellow Baptists voiced no complaints, and he was later invited to deliver a guest sermon in the Methodist church in Newcastle.

Munro resigned from the Newcastle pastorate in April 1880 but continued to serve for a time in the upriver churches. He then spent the better part of a year travelling and supply preaching. Afterwards, he had churches at Shediac, Salisbury, and elsewhere. Between 1896 and 1905 he was pastor of the church at Pennfield in Charlotte County, and he spent his retirement years there. Shortly before his death he published an article in The Maritime Baptist in which he stated that his faith was keeping him from despondency even though he was now "completely haltered in the stall of old age." He was survived by his second wife, Mrs. Hannah Soley, four children from his first marriage, and one child from his second.