| Notes |
- Marriages performed by Rev. John Carroll Wesleyan Methodist church
1840
April 23 John RODES to Elizabeth BAKER, by banns. Wit: Charles Dickinson, William Stephens.
http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~maryc/johns2.htm
Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
CARROLL, Rev. John Saltkill
John D.D. was born in 1809 Niagara-on-the-Lake and died in 1884 and is buried at Victoria Lawn, St Catharines (Section L) Grantham Twp. Lincoln Co., and he was received in 1829 at Cobourg, Methodist Episcopal, 1827 Scarborough/Toronto Twp. (4 months), 1828 Belleville/Stirling (Hastings Co.), 1829 Cobourg, 1830-1831 Perth, ordained in 1832 at Bytown/Ottawa, 1833 joined Wesleyan Conference, 1834 Matilda, 1835-1836 Brockville, 1837-1838 Cobourg, 1839 tutor Upper Canada Academy Cobourg, 1840 Brockville, 1840 Kingston, 1841 Bytown Chairman, 1842-1843 Prescott Chairman, 1844-1845 Kingston Chairman, 1845 Augusta (Johnstown), 1846-1847 Toronto East, 1848-1850 London Chairman, 1851-1853 Hamilton (Main St.) Chairman, 1854-1855 St. John's/Montreal C.E., 1855-1857 Belleville (Hastings Co.) Chairman, 1858-1860 Ottawa Chairman, 1861-1863 Monaghan (Peterborough Co.) Chairman, 1864-1866 Norfolk St. Guelph (Wellington Co.) Chairman, 1867 Puslinch (Wellington Co.), 1868 Grantham (Lincoln Co.), 1867-1868 Humberstone St. Catharines Chairman, 1869 General Agent S.S. Union, Toronto, 1870-1871 Yorkville (retired), 1872 Rochesterville (retired), 1873 Leslieville (retired), 1873 Ottawa, 1874-1881 Don Mount Toronto (York Co.), Author or "Past and Present", "Case and Cotemporaries" 5 vols, "School of the Prophets", The Stripling Preacher", "Life of Robert Corson", and several Tractates.
JOHN SALTKILL CARROLL (he never used his middle name), Methodist clergyman and author; b. 8 Aug. 1809 in a fishing hut on Saltkill?s Island, Passamaquoddy Bay, N.B., the elder of twin sons of Joseph Carroll and Molly Rideout; m. in 1833 Beulah Adams of Perth, Upper Canada, and they had one son; d. 13 Dec. 1884 at Leslieville (now part of Toronto), Ont.
John Carroll?s father, a saddler originally from County Down (Northern Ireland), was shipwrecked on the coast of New Brunswick after service on the British side in the American revolution and he settled in that province for some years. John was born in the course of a move by the family to Upper Canada and spent his first years in the Niagara peninsula and along the Grand River. His father served in the War of 1812, and in 1814 the family settled in York (Toronto) where John?s mother ran a boarding-house. His early formal education was much interrupted and virtually ended in the winter of 1817?18 when the York school, first conducted by William Barber, closed. In 1822?23 he spent an unhappy year on a brother?s bush farm northwest of York, and with his return to town became an apprentice in Jesse Ketchum?s tannery.
Although religion seems to have been little practised in the home during Carroll?s childhood, the New Light revival of Henry Alline in New Brunswick had made a strong impression on several members of the family. Carroll?s mother suffered for some years from religious melancholy, and an older brother underwent an impressive conversion towards the end of his brief life. John was enrolled in the first Methodist Sunday school in York at its inception in 1818; he was converted under Methodist preaching on 24 Aug. 1823, and a few weeks later experienced ?persuasion that God had cleansed my inmost heart.? In 1827, after a short period of teaching in the town of Scarborough, he was received on probation as a preacher, and in 1833 was ordained by the Canadian Wesleyan Conference which had just come into being through the affiliation of Canadian and British Methodists.
With the exception of the 1839?40 season, when because of ill health he was assigned the post of tutor at Upper Canada Academy, Cobourg, Carroll held a number of pastorates in Upper and Lower Canada until his superannuation in 1870. He then lived in Leslieville and at the time of his death was still engaged in founding suburban congregations around Toronto. He served as a chairman in ten different districts over a period of 27 years. In 1863 he was elected co-delegate or vice-president of the annual conference of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, the highest Methodist office open to a Canadian. The following year he addressed the Methodist Episcopal general conference in Philadelphia, and in 1876 the University of South Carolina conferred on him an honorary D.D. He seems to have been a man who enjoyed the confidence of his fellow ministers rather than one distinguished for outstanding gifts of administration or leadership. Essentially Carroll was an effective revivalist, most at home in a camp-meeting or on a new circuit, and in his later years he came to symbolize an era of ?happy? Methodism that was rapidly disappearing in such centres as Toronto with its settled congregations.
In the controversies that frequently convulsed Upper Canadian Methodism, Carroll always stood with the main Wesleyan body of the Canadian conference. He took this position in disputes with the followers of Henry Ryan who in the late 1820s were opposed to links with American Methodism; he did so again with the Methodist Episcopals who objected to the 1833 union with the British Wesleyan Conference. From 1845, however, he also worked continuously for the union of all branches of Canadian Methodism, and on one occasion issued a scheme of his own that offered concessions to minority groups. His Reasons for Wesleyan belief and practice, relative to water baptism (1862), an exposition of the Wesleyan Methodist position on the subject, was endorsed by officials of all Canadian Methodist groups.
Carroll is chiefly remembered, however, neither as a preacher nor as a controversialist, but as a chronicler of early Methodism and of pioneer life in Upper Canada. He began in 1837 to send historical sketches to the Christian Guardian (Toronto), and between 1867 and 1877 published Case and his cotemporaries, a laborious five-volume compilation of facts about early Canadian Methodism that is not only indispensible to the historian but is also interesting to the general reader for the anecdotes of saddle-bag preachers scattered through it. Carroll?s admiration for William Case as a kind of hero figure is reflected in the title. The stripling preacher (1852) and ?Father Corson? (1879) are works of pious remembrance. Of greatest literary interest among Carroll?s writings are My boy life (1882), a series of sketches of his childhood and youth in York, most of which had originally appeared as instalments in Pleasant Hours, a Sunday school paper, Past and present (1860), a series of ?crayons? of Methodist worthies reprinted from the Canadian Methodist Magazine, and The school of the prophets (1876), a frank account of Methodist personalities in the Perth area at the time of his pastorate there in the early 1830s, in which his talent for humorous description is least restrained by concern for denominational respectability.
Carroll?s works abound with the clich?s and conceits of the self-educated writer. He could on occasion be tedious or over-earnest, but at his best he was a skilful unmasker of pious foibles and pomposities. Few other writers have described 19th-century Canadian Methodism from within, and none with such irreverent yet sympathetic wit.
Rev. Carroll attended the laying of the cornerstone at the new Congregationalist Church in Guelph on May 16, 1867.
Charges: 1835 Brockville, 1845 Augusta (Johnstown), 1849-1851 London, 1851-1852 Hamilton (Main St.), 1854-1855 Montreal, 1855-1857 Belleville, 1858-1860 Ottawa, 1862-1864 Monaghan (Peterborough), 1864-1865 Norfolk St. Guelph, 1867 Puslinch (Wellington Co.), 1868 Grantham (Lincoln), 1868-1869 Humberstone St. Catharines, 1873 Ottawa, 1876 Don Mount Toronto (York Co.)
Rev. Carroll's writings
1852 "The Stipling Preacher" - or a shetch of the Life and Character with the Theological Remains of the Rev. Alexander S. Byrne - Published by Anson Green at the Conference Office No. 9 Wellington Building, King Street - price 60 cents..."The author has succeeded admirably in furnishing the Wesleyan Community with an interesting addition to its biographical literature" - Christian Guardian
1870 Reasons for Methodist Belief and Practice relative to Water Baptism
1877 "Case and his Cotemporaries"
1879 "Father Corson" or the old style Canadian itinerant; embracing the life and gosel labours of the Rev. Roert Corson, fifty-six years a Minister in connection with the Central Methodism of Upper Canada - Published by S. Rose Methodist Church of Canada
???? "A Needed Exposition" - The claims and allegations of the Canada Episcopals calmly considered - 72 pages
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~methodists/revcarroll.htm
History has proven John Carroll to have been a kind of Parson Adams of the real, an itinerant minister who actually did manage to publish his sermons to universal acclaim. His exchange with history was so thorough, in fact, that his various writings have assumed a profound historical significance that in no way detracts from their theological astuteness. Whether he wrote Methodist biography, history, or apologetics, Carroll invariably documented the evangelization of Canadian society and bore witness to the process of Canadian Confederation, but, even more important, he held up a flawless homiletic glass to himself, revealing as much about his own character as an overactive missionary as about the character of a land founded through missionary hyperactivity. His biographical portraits of Alexander Byrne, William Case, Robert Corson, a host of supporting Methodists, and even the fanciful Father McRorey and Squire Firstman are also an inadvertent self-portrait, just as his autobiography, My Boy Life (1882), gives an inclusive impression of his whole life by offering a subjective account of a mere part of it. In these respects, Carroll's unique contribution to Canadian letters lies in the area of vicarious biography and subjective history. But his more traditionally ministerial literary offerings to Canadian ecclesiastical history are nevertheless startlingly singular, distinguishing Carroll--in the select company of perhaps only one other preacher-writer, William Withrow (1839-1908)--as a prophetic archivist of Methodism in nineteenth-century Canada.
The transitory circumstances of his birth and early life--"Father's changeableness led to a great many wearisome moves," he writes in My Boy Life--anticipate the peripatetic nature of his clerical and authorial maturity. Born on 8 August 1809 on Saltkill Island, Passamaquoddy Bay, New Brunswick, to Joseph and Molly Rideout Carroll in the middle of his parents' journey from Fredericton to their thousand-acre grant in Upper Canada (Ontario), John Saltkill Carroll and his twin brother, Isaac (the last of twelve children), found themselves on the road only three weeks into their lives and for a further three weeks before finally reaching their destination. Realizing later that the grant of land was no longer available to his family was John Carroll's early introduction to moving on as an answer to disappointment. Later, ministerial itinerancy would be his unceasing response not to his own misfortunes but to those of his dispersed congregations.
The most influential incidents of Carroll's boyhood were his first encounters with native people, his exposure to the Battle of Fort Niagara (1813), the deaths of his eldest brother and of his twin brother, and his mother's conversion from a Quaker background to the aggressive foreground of Methodism. At the time of the Carrolls' arrival in York (Toronto), at the cessation of the War of 1812, only the Church of England was in operation, but the foundation of a Methodist meeting-house there in 1818 marked both the "spiritual birth-place" of Mrs. Carroll and her son's own passage "from death unto life" (My Boy Life), an innocently arduous passage that concluded in 1824, when John Carroll took up his mother's lead and officially converted to the Methodism with which previously he had only flirted. Despite having only the rudiments of a formal education, he seriously considered pursuing careers as a lawyer and as a physician before choosing the Christian ministry and then becoming a Methodist preacher in 1829. It was precisely as a circuit preacher crisscrossing hundreds of miles of newly settled territory north of Toronto that Carroll fulfilled his ministerial commitment, not only by meeting the spiritual needs of isolated Canadians but also by making the personal contacts and the personal observations that were to be the subject-matter of his theological and creative writing, of what has come to be acknowledged as his authorial ministry.
In his first book, The Stripling Preacher (1852), Carroll addressed himself to both biography and eulogy, the study focusing on the precocious life and the premature death of Rev. Byrne, the romantically charismatic Irish convert whom Carroll (while stationed at London, one of his many pastoral appointments in Ontario) had met in the winter of 1848-1849, and who had died in 1851 as a result of a chill caught during his Canadian preaching tour. Carroll's fascination with Byrne was due partly to his premature death (at the mere age of majority), but mainly to what Carroll recognized as their shared precocity: Byrne's adolescent conversion and ministry seemed at once to recall and to anticipate Carroll's own conversion at the age of fifteen and his own ministry begun at the age of twenty-one.
This early identification with the subject of his writing set an important precedent for his subsequent books on Methodist preachers in Canada and the United States. In Past and Present (1860), for example, Carroll offers quasi-impressionistic descriptions of his encounters with the proponents of Methodism, rather than pretending to offer historically objective descriptions. His approach to the common ground of theology, biography, and history is, in a telling word, unorthodox, the focus of his impressions and encounters repeatedly shifting back to himself. "I well remember my first sight of [Rev. William Gill]. It was at a camp-meeting, the presiding officer at which asked Gill to preach," he writes, concluding: "Ever after he was a favourite preacher with me" (Salvation!, 1967). Carroll's portraits are detailed and precise, imaginable and memorable, powerfully suggesting the corporate ministry in which he himself had an equal share. As the perceived and the perceiver coexist in the single act of perception, so the congregation and the preacher share in the oneness of spiritual reality: this is a basic truth Carroll expresses throughout his writing, both thematically and technically.
Perhaps the greatest of his works in this respect in his concurrent memoir of Methodists and history of Methodism, Case and His Contemporaries (1867-1877). Carroll's striking use of the word "contemporaries" (a seventeenth-century variant of "contemporaries" that went out of fashion early in the eighteenth century, and that was only barely current in Carroll's own day) suggests his characteristic view of his fellow itinerants as temporary coworkers coexisting in the history of salvation. His introductory description of this ambitious five-volume study as "a biographical history" has the permanence of Methodism to back it up, a permanence to which Carroll contributed immeasurably through multiple processes of documentation. His observations of Rev. Case and his confreres on the road to Confederation are invaluable and irreplaceable, profound declarations of Canadian religious history. The study's greatest distinguishing features are its meticulous organization, from table of contents through to index, and its engaging biographical rhythm of conversion-to-superannuation, counterpointing the traditional birth-to-death biographical cycle.
During the 1870s and until his death, Carroll's publications alternated between precisely this kind of "biographical history" and a more theologically orthodox kind of evangelical apologetics, although his publications in the latter style--Reasons for Wesleyan Belief and Practise Relative to Water Baptism (1862), A Needed Exposition (1877), and The "Exposition" Expounded (1881)--do not figure directly in his reputation as an author. In The School of the Prophets (1876), Carroll extended his biographical-historical approach into a more subjective and idiosyncratic fictional-factual compact, facetiously casting himself as William Warble, and casting Beulah Adams, daughter of War of 1812 veteran Capt. Joshua Adams, as Miss Hephzibah Firstman. Based on his ministerial tenure at Perth, Ontario, from 1830 to 1832, the work is a gentle roman ? clef, its characters modeled on easily identifiable historical personages, but exaggerated to the prickly point of the comically ridiculous. Carroll's self-caricature as an unassuming new minister and an ingenuous young lover is especially appealing and revealing. In Warble one sees a Methodist minister as representative as Carroll's peculiar vision can make him, and thus readers come to see Carroll himself in the role of a representative Methodist minister. History has come to see him in a similar way, as a man in his own mold.
Although the point of view of his other major "biographical history" of the 1870s, "Father Corson"; or, The Old Style Canadian Itinerant (1879), is characteristically his own, his focus is unusually precise and other-centered, Carroll representing the great itinerant minister Corson (whose long career had ended with his death the year before the book's publication) less as a mere clergyman among clergy than as an individual man and a model minister.
That John Carroll never made as direct a likeness of himself as he made of every one of his biographical-historical subjects is the greatest indication of his own other-centeredness and of his otherworldly kind of exile in language and time. The sketchy details of his adult life--which his single volume of straightforward autobiography, My Boy Life, and his cameo roles in his other writings do little to clarify--contrast with the subjective precision of his authorial expression. His disappearance into the ranks of Methodist ministers, the byways of itinerancy, the labyrinth of history, and the plethora of words simply makes his largely documentary and testimonial existence all the more authentic and memorable. John Carroll was indisputably one of the greatest religious observers of nineteenth-century Canada, his books occupying a place in Methodist history analogous to that of The Jesuit Relations (1632-1672) in Catholic history. He saw and visualized in prose what very few thought to record.
http://bookrags.com/John_Carroll
|
1849 - 1940 (91 years)
