I have written in EMCC History about forgotten women preachers in the Church’s history,¹ but I should not make the opposite impression that there were no men who were lesser-known members of the ministry. Even today, people come and go in the credentialed categories of the EMCC who are not widely known and maybe never will be in our circles at least. Some are approved by the Licensing and Ordination Committee but never receive a “call,” in our present system, and so are dropped after a couple of years never having served. In God’s eyes, they are loved.

Frederick Morgan Carlton was from Toronto, of Irish parentage, who was recruited to serve in the Mennonite Brethren in Christ Church about 1899. He became a “probationer,” as the language was then, assisting Noah Detwiler, an effective MBiC evangelist, at the Toronto West Mission.² Detwiler started the mission in 1897 along Spadina Avenue, a major north-south street in the heart of old Toronto.³ Fred was 21 or 22 years old, born in April 1877 according to a census return. His father, Robert Carlton, was a gardener by trade, who had emigrated from Ireland in 1861. His mother, Elizabeth, had also emigrated from Ireland in 1862. He had at least one older brother, Arthur, born in 1876, and a sister, Minnie E, born about 1873. In 1891, all of them listed themselves as Methodists—along with the Anglicans and Presbyterians, one of the dominant Canadian Protestant denominations.⁴ Of the three, the Methodist Church of Canada had a theology and practice somewhat close to the MBiC and occasionally there were connections such as a local Methodist preacher participating in MBiC camp meetings.⁵

In Toronto, Fred could live at home, but in 1900, the MBiC Canada Conference shifted him to the equally new mission in Guelph, led by Thomas Ford Barker.⁶ His portrait is included in a publicity photograph of MBiC Canada Conference ministers probably produced in the winter of 1900. The experience in Guelph did not go well perhaps, as Fred disappeared from MBiC records for a while. Perhaps he felt out of place in a Mennonite-Wesleyan church system? It was his first time living outside of Toronto? The 1901 census found him living back at home. The household was counted as Methodist, including Fred who was an assistant gardener.

Sam Goudie served the MBiC West End Mission 1903 to 1905, and he met Fred at the opening of a new site of the mission, on Brunswick Avenue in November 1903. From the way Goudie mentioned Fred in his diary, it is plain he knew him.⁷ The young man came to see Sam two weeks later and according to Sam, Fred “opened his heart to me.” Another two weeks later they had another long talk at Queen’s Park (on the grounds of the Ontario provincial legislature). Sam recorded, “but only God knows how much is true of all he says.”

Then a year later, at the end of 1904, Fred showed up once more at a prayer meeting at Sam and Eliza Goudie’s house. “F. Carlton made a fresh start. May the Lord help the poor boy,” the diary says. Fred started to attend the Brunswick mission, just north of Harbord Street. It seems he also became interested in a young woman working in the city from a Mennonite farm in Whitchurch Township, north of Toronto.⁸ She was a member of the mission, Luella Mary Pipher, 19 years old in March 1905.

Anyway, Fred responded to the preaching at the mission in early 1905 and professed to be really saved. Three weeks later, Fred prayed to be sanctified. Sam took Fred with him on pastoral visits a few times, and brought him home for tea, and talk. When Fred asked to become a member of the church, Sam set a day in February, and Fred and another man became members.⁹

Meanwhile, Fred and the young lady, Luella, came to see Sam. “Had quite a visit,” Sam wrote in his diary. Then Luella came to see Sam and his wife alone. Finally her mother (Rosanna Pipher) came and in his diary, Sam said she came to see him about her daughter’s “trouble.” He did not say what it was about, though.

In early March, Sam wrote that he went looking for Fred at his parent’s house, but Fred was not there. His mother said Fred was out drinking. Sam’s comment was, “poor fellow.” It seems alcohol was part of Fred’s problem. A week later Sam went looking for Fred in “the Park,” one of Toronto’s parks, maybe where he worked, but Sam could not find him.

Change. Later in March 1905, Sam Goudie was elected the superintendent of half of the MBiC churches in Ontario, and his duties changed completely. Sam’s older brother Henry replaced Sam as the pastor of Bethel Chapel, and all mention of Fred ends in Sam’s diary. But this is not the end of Fred Carlton’s story.

The Find-a-Grave website says Fred and Luella were married on April 19 1905, in “Ringwood, ON,” a village on the Markham-Whitchurch Townline, just west of Stouffville, north of Toronto.¹⁰ There was a Christian Church in Ringwood.¹¹ One of Luella’s older sisters, Priscilla/ Persilla, several times recorded her religion as “Christian” in the census, probably meaning the denomination, not the general designation used by people today. I suspect the sister made the connection and arranged for the wedding near the family farm. Goudie, knowing Fred’s inconsistent Christian profession, probably could not, in conscience, conduct the wedding. The marriage registration would tell more of the tale, but I don’t pay genealogical sites for their proprietary information.

In the Canada census of 1911, six years later, I found Fred listed in Toronto. He was married to Luella, now the mother of two children, Ruth Winnifred (b 1906) and Grace Gloria (b 1908). They said they were Methodists, and Fred’s father, widower, was living with them, his mother having apparently died in the meantime. Luella’s brother Harvey was living with them, too, and her sister, Priscilla. Fred was working, the brother and one of the sisters were working. It must have been a busy household. It is nice to see the Whitchurch Pipher siblings together.

There is another twist to this story. When I looked for Fred and Luella in the 1921 Canada census, there was Fred, 45 years old, his wife, 35 years old, with three children (the youngest was Pauline, 9). Fred is a gardener/landscaper, just like his father was. His sister-in-law, Priscilla, was still living with them, working as a nurse. As to religion, the census reported the family were now Mennonites again. I hope, for reconciliation’s sake, they were attending one of the two Mennonite Brethren in Christ missions in the city!¹² After this, I do not know what happened to Fred Carlton.¹³

There are further twists. I could find not a trace of him or Luella (often going by her other name, Mary) or his daughters, anywhere in Canada in the 1931 census. This is not that unusual, as I have noted, it is somewhat common for the Canadian census to absolutely miss people I know are alive and probably in Canada in the census year.¹⁴ One daughter, Ruth, was married by then (1928) and the other lost to census tracing by surname.

But the daughter Pauline Angelus Carlton (b 1912) did show up by Find-a-Grave searches. She died in 2009 at 97-98 and was buried in the Dickson Hill Cemetery along Highway 48 in Markham. She was buried beside some of her Pipher sisters and a brother, and her husband not far away! This is back to her mother’s home area. The genealogical note mentions Pauline’s mother died as Mary Luella (Pipher) De Rosiers in 1975. The information accompanying the record tells that Pauline married Allen Mark Mallory (d 1986), a pastor of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. Her wedding must have been early in the 1930s. Further searches found that her son, Paul Mark Mallory, tragically died at 21 in a Royal Canadian Air Force plane crash at Dorval Airport, Montreal, in bad weather the night of May 16 1953. This was just two days before his wedding to a Kitchener lady. Intriguingly, the son was born in Stouffville, Feb 22 1932. Newspaper clippings in the Flying Officer’s file mentions that his father had been pastor of the Kitchener Gospel Temple.¹⁵ Other references produced that the Mallorys had served at KGT 1938-1941 and 1948-1951.¹⁶

Luella (Pipher Carlton) was married sometime, according to Find-a-Grave, to a Ross Andrew Desrosiers¹⁷ (b 1889) who was from Hastings County in eastern Ontario. He died at and is buried at Comox, British Columbia, in 1956.¹⁸ I do not know the circumstances of that second marriage. I found him in Vancouver, BC, in 1931, a hairdresser in a department store, married, 42, but not listed with a wife there. Strangely, his step-daughter Ruth and husband Ralph MacKenzie are also buried in Comox on Vancouver Island rather later. There are mysteries here. From the career of Luella’s youngest daughter, I would guess that the faith of Jesus was carried on somehow by somebody in the family. We will think well of them all.

Banner: Queen’s Park in 1890. Sam Goudie met Fred somewhere on these grounds in December 1903. Credit: Picryl image, Wikimedia Commons.

1See EMCC History Blogs on “Edith Abbott,” “Sarah McQuarrie,” “Mariah Parr,” “Alexander Sisters,” the women who worked at the East End Mission (Toronto), in Manitoba, and many other more incidental references scattered throughout.

2Clare Fuller (2014), https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Detweiler,_Noah_(1839-1914)

3Well told in F Arthur Sherk, Keeping Faith: A Centennial History of Banfield Memorial Church (Willowdale, ON: Banfield Memorial Church, 1997) p 2, 12-13.

4Baptists rarely appear in the records of the early EMCC because of their generally Reformed theology. They rejected the conference structure of the MBiC as a matter of principle. They were also less numerous in Canada than in the USA.

5Mr Bedingfield from the Stayner Methodist Church at the Elmwood camp-meeting in 1896. Goudie preached in the Methodist Church in Didsbury, Alberta, when he was there for the first MBiC camp-meeting in July 1905.

6One incident early in Barker’s time in Guelph is reported in EMCC History “African-origin People in the early EMCC in Ontario, Part 2.” Barker, an ex-Salvationist from New Brunswick, became a missionary to Armenian Turkey in 1901; Clare Fuller (2016), https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Barker,_Ada_Moyer_(1875-1982)&oldid=175102.

7Information from the diaries of Sam Goudie, courtesy of the Eleanor (Goudie) Bunker family. Most diary references are in my book Hidden in Plain Sight: Sam Goudie and the Ontario Mennonite Brethren in Christ (Eugene, OR/ Hamilton, ON: Pickwick Publications/ McMaster Divinity College Press, 2024) p 128-129.

8York County had several kinds of Mennonites and it is not possible simply from Canada census returns to differentiate them normally.

9The other was N H Reichard, who became a long-standing leader in Bethel Chapel, as the Brunswick mission became known. Later known as Banfield Memorial and still later as Wellspring Worship Centre. It is no longer an EMCC congregation.

10https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/207695022/pauline-angelus-mallory

11It’s closed now, but I once preached in the building of the rather historic Ringwood Christian Church when I was in Ontario Theological Seminary.

12There was also a mission of the Mennonite Conference of Ontario on Danforth Avenue from 1909.

13Again, if he died in Ontario, there would be registration of death in the Public Archives.

14Sometimes people moved to the USA for a while. It may be the enumerator misspelled or their handwriting is unreadable to later transcribers. I have untangled a few problems that way.

15https://caspir.warplane.com/personnel/unit-search/p/600012368

16Richard Burton, The Lord has Helped Us: KGT (Kitchener, ON: For the Author, 2008) p 43.

17Spellings vary, even in the same website. His grave marker is spelled Des Rosiers. See next footnote!

18https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/206345658/ross_andrew_desrosier