What the Disciples Can Tell Us About the Oliphants

It's been a good few generations since the name Oliphant has appeared on the Rutherford family tree. This is how the descent goes:  David Oliphant Sr. and his wife Sophia Watt were the first generation to travel to Canada.  They had a daughter,  Mary Oliphant, who married William Elliot (of Dundas and later Toronto),  and in turn their daughter, Mary (Minnie) Elliot, married John Galloway Scott (see previous post).  This makes David Sr. my husband's great-great-great-great grandfather.  The Oliphants seems to have slipped out of family memory (various other names, such as Rutherford, Scott, Elliot, Bulmer and Norton have served as middle names for various Fyfes I've known or heard about, but there aren't any modern-day Fyfes or Rutherfords with the middle name Oliphant still kicking around).  However,  the Oliphant family was quite an interesting one.

I'm getting a lot of my information from the book How the Disciples Came Together in Early Ontario by Edwin Broadus (Gospel Herald Foundation, Beamsville Ontario, 2009).  He writes a whole chapter on David Oliphant Senior, whom he calls "among the most influential of the Baptists of Scottish background in the development of the Disciples in Ontario" (28).  The Oliphant family was from St. Andrews, Scotland, and they came to Canada for the sake of David Sr.'s health (he had asthma).  According to Reuben Butchart (The Disciples of Christ in Canada since 1830, 1949, p. 58-59) in Scotland David Sr. was a "pastor at a Baptist church in St. Andrews", although in Canada he appears to have taken up shoemaking to support himself.  George Barclay, a contemporary of Oliphant's, is quoted by a Disciple periodical as saying "I was once a member of a  Baptist church in Largo, Scotland, with D. Oliphant's [i.e. David Oliphant Jr's.] father and mother, before they were married."  (The Christian Banner, June 1885, 167).   (According to Broadus, Largo is very close to St. Andrews, and "a Scotch Baptist church was formed in Lower Largo on the Firth of Forth in 1790" (29)).   

Broadus tells us that David traveled to Canada in 1821 with his oldest son Alexander (11 years old) while his wife Sophia Watt stayed in Scotland with their four younger children.  David Sr. and Alexander moved first to Esquesing Township, northwest of York, where they joined a small congregation of Disciples in the Norval church.  Shortly afterwards the father and son moved to Dundas, Ontario, where David began preaching regularly.  In 1823 David's wife Sophia and the rest of their children finally joined them.  At this point some of the Lesslie family were also living and worshipping in Dundas, as was William Elliot.  William Lyon MacKenzie was also living in Dundas during this time and I am certain the Oliphants knew him, as in 1837  David and Sophia (now living in Eramosa township) hid MacKenzie's co-conspirators Samuel Lount and Edward Kennedy overnight as they were running away after the battle of Montgomery's Tavern. (The Lesslie family was also very intimate with William Lyon MacKenzie, who had traveled to Canada with 18-year-old John Lesslie.  MacKenzie and Lesslie were in partnership together briefly in York and in Dundas in the "Lesslie and Sons" stores that John Lesslie founded in these places.)  It was towards the end of the Oliphant's stay in Dundas that Mary Oliphant and William Elliot were married.

In 1826 David Sr. and Edward Lesslie, Sr. were both on a committee to build a meeting hall for all the local Christian denominations in Dundas.  The Chapel, which they called the Free Church, was completed in 1830 and David Sr. preached the first sermon (Broadus, 31).  In 1829, David Sr. and some fellow Christians of varied background formed a group to create a combined Sunday School, which they called the Dundas Union Sabbath School.  David Sr. was the Vice President of the school committee, and his son Alexander was the school librarian.  I find it interesting that David Sr. was involved in these co-operative ventures with other local Christian congregations.  He seems to have been community-minded and not just narrowly interested in the welfare of his own denomination.   His son David Jr. recalled many years later that "his father was very liberal, compared to other  Baptists from Scotland."  (Broadus, 32).  It was sometime during his stay in Dundas that David Sr. began seriously reading the work of Alexander Campbell of the Stone-Campbell movement in the United States, particularly Campbell's two journals, the Christian Baptist and the Millenial Harbinger.

In 1832 David and Sophia and their family moved to Eramosa township on land that "included the future site of the village of Everton." but from what I can gather was pretty much wilderness at that time.  A Disciple family headed by James and Lois Black lived a mile and a half from the Oliphants and had built a log meeting-house on their property, where the Oliphants went to worship.  David Oliphant Sr. had a profound influence on James Black's religious views, introducing him to Campbell's writings over a period of some time, and the two of them became the Everton church's intellectual leaders. David Oliphant Jr. describes their relationship and Black's initial reaction to Oliphant's religious ideas in somewhat flowery prose:

"These two students of the sacred scripture became sufficiently acquainted to co-work in the government of Our Lord;  and although very different men, they were in certain respects the complement of each other.  Elder Black, his firmly compacted body and full brain, with comparative youth on his side [Oliphant was twenty years older than Black], was an unremitting and effective laborer. Father Oliphant, with his ripe experience and love of reformation, although far from robust, possessing strength to labor in public very limitedly, was a degree or two in advance of his contemporaries in distinguishing where the line ran between the city of Jerusalem and the city of Babylon.  A reformatory publication [the Millennial Harbinger] highly prized by Father Oliphant, having been placed in the hands of Elder Black for perusal, escaped very narrowly a martyr's fate, for at that date the zealous elder was so earnestly attached to certain portions of the Geneva theology that he not only disrelished, but strongly opposed, what did not fit with the teachings he had received by tradition from the theological fathers.  Nobly, though not speedily, he allowed his mind and heart to acknowledge reformatory truth, and took the lead in more than a few movements in the direction of reformation."  

Lucien Moote, who grew up in the Disciple faith, recalls that "Personally I can remember all the preachers except:  Sheppard:  Oliphant:  Black:  Anderson:  Benedict:  these being among the very earliest:  I heard my parents talk about them so much it seems as though I saw them." (unpublished letter from Lucien Moote to Reuben Butchart, April 4, 1933, Reuben Butchart fonds, Victoria College Archives, University of Toronto, F52, Box 2, File 1).

In a 1937 piece entitled "Article Upon the Subject of the Disciples for an Inquirer", Reuben Butchart speaks of the importance of rural churches in the early years of the Disciples of Christ history, and in the scope of evangelistic activity within the church.

"The Disciples of Christ in Ontario began as a rural religious people (sic) and for many years their principle strength was in the country...The churches named--Eramosa, Norval, and Lobo tp--became great centres of church life in this province.  It was from its doors that certain evangelists were sent, such as James Black, Alex. Anderson, James Kilgour, David Oliphant, and others in the early days who did great things in the way of evangelism and organizing churches of Christ...their preaching and influence was felt greatly in their surrounding territory--Erin tp for example--but extending as far as the Georgian Bay region, the Niagara Peninsula, and to Eastern Ontario, and particularly in Prince Edward County...".

Butchart also describes what it was like to be an itinerant evangelist at this time:

"...every year the Everton church sent forth two of the men named [i.e. Black, Anderson, Kilgour, Oliphant, and "others"] who made trips on horseback over the difficult roads of the province, with their baggage sling [sic] across their horses' back and finding a welcome in the homes of the brethren wherever they were sent.  They stayed perhaps for weeks in a new community, found converts and started a church;  afterwards it was their duty to visit it and endeavor to keep it within the truth and strengthen the brethren, all of this being but a scriptural form of evangelism...all these men are held in sainted memory by many, actually they have held the loving thoughts of thousands of Disciples...since their work has become known as the foundation stones of our cause in Ontario."   

Disciple churches in Selkirk and Winger are among those who remember Oliphant and his fellows "planting" them.  An incident recalled by J.W. Bradt of Selkirk illustrates how the founding evangelists might be called upon to keep the church "within the truth", making at times some unpopular decisions:

"Brother J.J. Warner was a match maker and elder of the church, and one of the chief speakers.  He was a good speaker, but held some Advent opinions which he put forward.  This caused a good deal of feeling, and Brother Oliphant was called to adjust the differences.  After considerable trouble and heart burnings, Brother Oliphant settled the matter by withdrawing followship [sic] to Brother Warner.  This action was characterized by some as popery and split the church, causing a division from which it never entirely recovered.  Brother Warner preached when invited, but never came back as a member."  ("Church History:  Church of Christ Selkirk, Aylmer, Sweets Corners, Windmill Point, Winger" by J.W. Bradt, Selkirk, Ontario, 1930, self-published booklet in Reuben Butchart archival material).

Of course David Oliphant Sr.'s influence on the Disciple movement in Ontario has to include the dedication which he must have fanned in the heart of his sons, particularly David Jr., who went on to become a prolific writer and editor for the movement, in many ways its local spokesperson and one of the connecting strands between Disciples in Canada and America.  David Sr.'s other sons were also demonstrably dedicated to their faith.  Again, I am frustrated by the silence of historic materials on women in the movement.  I wonder how Mary Oliphant, with such an upbringing and with a brother as active as David, can have left the Disciples after her marriage.  Or did she remain while her husband left?  It's difficult to find out.

David Oliphant Jr. 

Unfortunately, the whole Oliphant family appears to have been rather sickly, and many of them, with the exception of Mary (Oliphant) Elliot, died young.  David Sr. died in 1855 at age 63.  In an unpublished letter written by Edith Kilgour Bain to Mary E. Oliphant, both grandchildren of David Sr., she tells us that "Of the four children of David and Sophia Oliphant, Alexander, the oldest and a very brilliant young man, died in Everton in 1834 at the age of 24,  Mary married William Elliot at the age of 20 and died in 1890, age 78,  William (my grandfather) was born in 1814 and died in 1856, cutting short a very promising life;  David, your father, was the youngest...".  David Jr. died at age sixty-three near London, Ontario, and was buried in the Mount Pleasant Cemetery in London.  His daughter Mary E. Oliphant wrote to Reuben Butchart on Sept. 2, 1943, that "As my father died at the age of 63 it can hardly be said that his activities were curtailed because of age but rather because of impaired health."  Both letters can be found at the Reuben Butchart archives at Victoria College, University of Toronto (fonds 52, box 4, file 1).