UPDATE (January 2021): I had an e-mail from a Mark McElwain, who confirms that the minister in the group photo down below is Alec Renton. It seems Mr. McElwain’s father, the Rev. William McElwain, succeeded Renton as Minister of First Presbyterian. He was there from 1959-1962. Rev. McElwain passed away in St. Catharine’s, Ontario, in 2004. His obituary is here.
I also did a bit of Googling and found that after leaving Verdun, Rev. Renton went to East Hampton, New York. First Presbyterian Church of East Hampton has quite an extensive biography of him on its website. It includes a story, apparently widely reported at the time, that he was hired by First Pres in Verdun sight unseen. They hired him as their pastor based on a “cassette tape” he sent from Scotland. You can read the whole post here. In fact, it must have been a reel-to-reel tape because cassettes and 8-tracks were only developed in the 60s! Here is a clipping from an unknown newspaper about the momentous event.
ORIGINAL POST:
Family trees are funny. They usually start with an individual, then show his two parents, four grandparents, and so on. They tend to make everything look tidier than it could possibly have been in real life. What if great-grandpa was married twice? What do we do with that information? What if grandma had thirteen brothers and sisters? Where do they go? You can find yourself running off the page pretty quickly.
If you were to draw our SouthWest United family tree, I guess you’d put Verdun United and Crawford Park United as the two parents. But I think you’d have to include Chalmers United and First Presbyterian Church as aunts and uncles; even St. Paul’s United in Ville Emard must qualify as a cousin or something.
Verdun and Crawford amalgamated, while the other churches I mentioned closed in the 80s and 90s, and some of the people who worshipped in those churches found their way to our congregation. I think of the Buchanans as a SouthWest family, but they worshipped at St. Paul’s until it closed in 1991. The Padghams went to Chalmers, the Hasties to First Pres.
I was talking to Doug Hastie this week about some old sepia prints that turned up (Historical Stuff really has been just appearing at the church; I think we have elves). I recognized the exterior of the First Presbyterian building at 503* 5th Avenue (now a Tibetan Buddhist centre). It was built in 1925 and this picture was taken long before the extension which now houses Verdun Community Church, was built in 1956. I’m not an expert when it comes to cars, but the one parked outside the church in this shot suggests the 1940s.
There were also sepia prints of church interiors which Doug confirmed were of First Pres, but appeared to be before his time. Finally, there was a shot of a group of people standing outside a building, and one woman was holding a spade. I guessed this might be a sod-turning ceremony as First Presbyterian prepared to build the extension in the ‘50s. Doug was able to recognize Rev. Alec Renton, a Scotsman who he says was the minister there in the ‘50s.
Doug Hastie was one of a group of First Pres members who were officially received into the United Church of Canada in 2010 at SouthWest United. If anyone else can identify any of the other people in the picture, please get in touch with the office!
Rev. Alec Renton is at centre. Can you recognize anyone else? C.1955
Amy
*the current address of the original building is 503 and the extension is 501. Back in the day, the original building’s address was 501, 5th Avenue.