(1819-23 Aug. 1893), clergyman. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland. His parents were Presbyterians, but John King was converted at an early age to the Baptist religion. In 1841 he came to Canada as a missionary, and there, in his first years, he worked in the pioneer communities east and west of the Ottawa River as a Baptist missionary. Afterwards, he was pastor for a quarter-century, beginning in 1844, of the Baptist church at Dalesville, Que. (Dalesville is north of Lachute and Brownsburg.)

     In 1869 he accepted a call to the Baptist pastorate of Notfield, Roxborough, and Riceville. He held this combined pastorate of three churches, inconveniently distant rather than far distant from each other, but situated in three counties (GC, Stormont County, Prescott) from May 1869 to Dec. 1876. A later Maxville-area Baptist minister wrote, “During this pastorate another revival swept over the community and 32 were baptized.” (“The Story of the Dominionville Baptist Church”) However, the writer of King’s funeral sermon concedes that despite some good events, “The eight years of labour there [at the three churches already named] were not so happy or fruitful as those in Dalesville.”

     In 1877 King returned to Dalesville, and resumed his pastorate of the Baptist church there, remaining pastor of that church till some three years before his death. Altogether, he had been pastor at Dalesville for some 40 years. He died at his residence at Dalesville after being totally incapacitated through several years’ of his final illness. The author of his funeral sermon wrote, “Physically, Pastor King was tall, stout, a large, strong-looking man, and for many years he possessed a splendid constitution, well adapted for hard toil among the rocks, hills and rivers of Chatham Township.” (Dalesville was in Chatham Township.) The Rev. John King was married about 1845 to Elizabeth McGibbon. (9 children) Sent to work at the age of ten “to learn the lapidary trade with an uncle who kept a shop in Princess Street, Edinburgh,” he had little formal education but he took “a short course in Montreal Baptist College” in his early years in Canada.

     The Canadian Baptist Archives at McMaster University have manuscript and typescript copies of his writings, including a journal and a history of the Dalesville church. Extracts have been published in Cyrus Thomas’ History of the Counties of Argenteuil, Que., and Prescott, Ont. (1896) pp. 343-364. These published extracts include a few notices of Breadalbane and other parts of GC (e.g., much of the area around Alexandria was “not well cultivated”). They omit the years of his Notfield pastorate, except for a vivid description of the conditions which he found in the countryside in the immediate aftermath of the Winter of the Deep Snow during his journey from Dalesville to Notfield, where he arrived on 7 May 1869. The manuscript journal in the Canadian Baptist Archives includes reflections, many of them unflattering to the local people, on his experiences in the 1869-1876 Ontario pastorate. In the journal, he criticises the violent and intolerant behaviour of a GC clergyman he refers to as Mr. G. (clearly, he means the Rev. Daniel Gordon). Sir Edward Peacock, in his unpublished autobiography, tells the story of how his grandfather MacDougall caused the Rev. Daniel Gordon to burst into tears and admit he was wrong, when MacDougall interrupted Gordon’s savage public denunciation of a Baptist clergyman (unnamed in the autobiography, but probably John King or E. R. Rainboth). King published a letter in the Montreal Daily Witness of 20 Oct. 1873 praising the religious awakening which was in progress in Indian Lands. The revival had begun among the Presbyterians of the Gordon Church at St. Elmo.

The Canadian Baptist, 28 Sept. 1893, 2 Nov. 1893 (QF; text of memorial sermon by Rev. John Higgins, with biog. data, fine portrait in line-drawn engraving) * Thomas 336, 343-364, 659-660 * MacMillan, Kirk, 192 * “The Story of the Dominionville Baptist Church,” The Maxville Messenger, June 1920 (see G. W. Allen) * Winter of the Deep Snow: passage noted by J.E. McIntosh, Ottawa Farm Journal 12 Dec. 1944 * Peacock autobiography: see notes to life of Sir E. Peacock *obituary of his immediate predecessor in the Notfield pastorate, Rev. Charles Brierly, killed Aug. 1868 by an accident with a horse, Witness 11 Sept. 1868; Brierly mentioned also Maxville (1967) 25