Chamberlain, Theophilus

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Gertrude Tratt, “CHAMBERLAIN, THEOPHILUS,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 6, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/chamberlain_theophilus_6E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Soldier, jp, surveyor, and office holder; b. 20 or 27 Oct. 1737 in Northfield, Mass., fourth son of Ephraim Chamberlain and Anne Merriman; m. 15 May 1768, apparently in Danbury, Conn., Editha White, and they had two children; m. secondly 24 Dec. 1781 Lamira Humphraville, and they had eight children; d. 20 July 1824 in Preston, N.S.
    • An uncle adopted the seven-year-old Theophilus and saw that he received an education. In the Seven Years’ War the young man served with Burke’s Rangers. Ingenious, determined, and physically fit.
    • Within a few years he entered Yale College, graduating ba in 1765. After studying theology under the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock at Lebanon, Conn., he was ordained a Congregational minister on 29 April 1765, and with a fellow minister was immediately dispatched to the settlements of the Six Nations in New York. In 1768 he was re-ordained as a Sandemanian bishop, married, and moved to Danbury, where he set up a clothing business.
    • Overt persecution began about 1770, when Chamberlain and others found themselves before the courts for ignoring warnings to leave town. For their refusal to contribute to the war fund some, including Chamberlain, were imprisoned; they were then freed and allowed to go to British-controlled territory.  
    • As the British occupation drew to a close, Chamberlain accepted a captain’s commission in the city militia from Sir Guy Carleton with responsibility for arranging the transfer to Halifax of a group of refugees. With his family and friends he reached there in the early fall of 1783.
    • Almost at once he was commissioned a justice of the peace, named a deputy surveyor, appointed to lay out a new township east of Dartmouth, and made agent to distribute land within the area, which at that time boasted only a handful of stragglers from the Dartmouth settlement. The actual grant in December 1784 gave Chamberlain and 143 others, including loyalists, blacks, disbanded soldiers, and Germans, a “plantation” of 32,000 acres in Preston, his name for the new township. Chamberlain himself received one of two grants of 1,000 acres.
    • Chamberlain’s long career was many-sided. He was a pragmatist with principles: as circumstances or conscience required, he moved with little hesitation from one task to another, wasting no time on regret, salvaging what he could, seeking new solutions to old problems or taking on new challenges. His loyalism was typical in that it was based on the political and social need for a duly constituted figure of authority irrespective of the figure itself.
  • Proven United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=1389
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/173503072/theophilus-chamberlain