their children taught the Bible, the catechism, and the prin- ciples of morality in Methodist Sunday Schools. The Sunday School superintendent for 1882 was Thomas Hodgson who later left the community for the United States.

St. James Methodist Church, with the dimensions of

. is

The 1907 list of trustees for St. James Church

was Jabez Yeo,John Yeo, Laurence Yeo,John Best, Alexander Crossman, and Herbert Enman.John T. Best’s diary entry of Jan 29, 1919 reads, “Mr. Edward Simmons was elected trustee and Mrs. Robert Yeo and Earl Yeo, also Mr. Simmons representative. In all seven trustees.” In 1919, St.James Methodist Church had a woman trustee, fifty-one years prior to the election of

the first woman elder in 1970 at the Lot 16 United Church.

roughly 30-feet by (SO-feet, had the appear- ance of a large hall; there was no steeple. The church accommodated approximately seventy- five people. The church building sat in the from center portion of the current cemetery. Wendell Yeo of Southwest, in his description of the church said, “I can still see St. James Methodist Church right in my eye. There was a big stone step which, once you walked up, you turned to the left and passed through the door into a porch. The door into the church was to the right of the porch. Once inside, the church was set up much like the current United Church. There was a center isle with two rows of very wide wooden pews. The floor was wide wooden boards. The pulpit and organ sat at the front and there was a raised choir loft holding about nine chairs. The pulpit is the one that is now used in the Lot 16 COmmunity Hall as a podium. The organ is outside in my garage. The windows

had the oval shape at the top.”25 Renovations were done at the church in 1910.

The End of St. James

Once the Methodists and Presbyterians joined together in Lot 16, St. James was utilized for several decades as a Sunday School facility. Older members of the current United Church congregation have vivid memories of attend- ing Sunday School in the Methodist church.

Wendell Yeo relates, “I can still remember walking down to Sunday school at the Methodist Church. Sunday school

would start in the spring as soon as the roads were fit to

27 ORIGINS OF OUR FAITH