(1836-30 May 1909), teacher and missionary. (Lucy Baker) Born at Summerstown, GC. She was raised by an aunt in Dundee, Que., and was educated at Dundee and at Fort Covington, N.Y. Lucy Baker was co-manager of a school in New Orleans when the American Civil War began. In 1878 she was teaching French in a school for girls at Lancaster, GC. At this time her minister at Lancaster, the Rev. Donald Ross, who had been appointed missionary to the Indians in Prince Albert in the Canadian West, persuaded her to accompany him and his wife to the west and to take up a teaching position in his mission school. In 1879, Mr and Mrs Ross and Miss Baker travelled to their scene of mission work in the West. From the fall of 1879 Lucy Baker was active as a teacher and missionary working among the Cree and Sioux Indians. She learned the Sioux language. In 1907 she left the Sioux reserve about ten miles from Prince Albert and retired to Prince Albert. She died at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal. Presbyterian. She never married. A report on her death, Glengarry News 4 June 1909, Lancaster column, mentions an “admirable photogravure” of her in Monday’s Montreal Herald. See also Catherine MacSweyn.
Life by Michael Owen, Dictionary of Canadian Biography XIII * E.A. Byers, Lucy Margaret Baker (1920) * G. MacEwan, And Mighty Women Too (1975) * W. Stanford Reid, ed., Called to Witness, I (1975) * portrait and biog. note in Thomas Melville Bailey, The Covenant in Canada (1975) * Rev. Donald Ross: see the note on him in the life, this dictionary, of another Rev. Donald Ross