(died 30 April 1890, aged 63), minister’s wife. Parents: Rev. James Robertson and his wife Elizabeth Murray. James Robertson emigrated from Scotland to the United States, and afterwards to Canada, and was a Congregationalist minister in Sherbrooke, Que., at the time of his daughter’s marriage. Mary Robertson was educated at Sherbrooke Young Ladies’ Academy and at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, in South Hadley, Mass. According to her son she was offered (but declined) the principalship of Mount Holyoke while she was still in her early twenties. She married Rev. Daniel Gordon in 1851, when he was minister at Lingwick, Que. She did not know Gaelic at the time of her marriage but acquired enough with the aid of her husband to help her in conducting Bible classes with the Highland women of Lingwick, and afterwards with those of Glengarry.
She appears in her son’s Glengarry novels as the saintly Mrs Murray, the minister’s wife, and in his autobiography he praises her in the highest terms. Paying tribute to her role in the Great Revival, her husband wrote that “those who formed, as it were, the nucleus of our band of enquirers and converts, were without exception, members of Mrs. Gordon’s Bible Class.” (quoted in MacMillan, Kirk 433) She herself wrote about the revival in a Presbyterian publication, The Home and Foreign Record, in 1866. Besides performing the religious duties of a minister’s wife, she organized sewing circles for the women at Lingwick and in Glengarry. Perhaps with more than a hint that improvement was in order, her son writes that in Glengarry she helped the women “to make their homes clean and beautiful.” Many decades afterwards, Norman MacLeod praised the sewing skills his mother had acquired from Mrs Gordon.
Her son wrote that babies arrived “with biennial regularity.” Two of the Gordon children are buried in the cemetery of the Gordon Church at St. Elmo. Mary Gordon died in Toronto, at the home of her son Dr Gilbert Gordon, where she had been taken when her illness set in a few weeks before. The burial was in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto. If the statement of C.W. Gordon can be taken literally, her six sons were the pallbearers. She was the sister of the novelist Margaret Murray Robertson. Three of her brothers achieved distinction as lawyers, and another, Joseph Gibb Robertson, was in the Quebec cabinet holding the office of treasurer of the province. Mary Gordon was the mother of Rev. C.W. Gordon and James Robertson Gordon, and was a first cousin of the eminent Hebrew scholar and editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, William Robertson Smith (1846-1894).
Death notice, Toronto Globe 1 May 1890 * sources as for life of her husband * C.W. Gordon, Postscript to Adventure (1938) 10-11 &c. (QF), portrait * Elizabeth Blair and Ewan Ross, The Gordon Church, St. Elmo and the Inscriptions on Its Tombstones (1972) 15 * life of William Robertson Smith, DNB & ODict * lives in Dictionary of Canadian Biography of Mary Gordon’s brothers Andrew Robertson (Vol. X) and Joseph Gibb Robertson (Vol. XII), and of her sister Margaret Murray Robertson (Vol. XII) * Norman MacLeod’s recollections of Mr & Mrs Gordon, in Russ Dewar, “Sage Recalls Early Days in Glengarry,” Standard Freeholder (ND), WSC 82