Ruckle (Heck), Barbara

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: G. S. French, “RUCKLE, BARBARA (Heck),” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 5, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ruckle_barbara_5E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • b. 1734 in Ballingrane (Republic of Ireland), daughter of Bastian (Sebastian) Ruckle and Margaret Embury; m. 1760 Paul Heck in Ireland, and they had seven children, of whom four survived infancy; d. 17 Aug. 1804 in Augusta Township, Upper Canada.
    • The Methodist historian Abel Stevens wrote in 1866: “The progress of Methodism in the United States has now indisputably placed the humble name of Barbara Heck first on the list of women in the ecclesiastical history of the New World. . . . The magnitude of her record must chiefly consist of the ‘setting’ of her precious name, made from the history of the great cause with which her memory is forever identified, more than from the history of her own life.” Barbara Heck was involved fortuitously in the inception of Methodism in the United States and Canada, and her fame rests on the natural tendency of a highly successful movement or institution to glorify its beginnings in order to strengthen its sense of tradition and continuity with its past.
    • The tradition, which is doubtless largely authentic, is that Barbara Heck’s concern about their worldliness came to a head in 1766 when she came upon a group of her friends playing cards in her kitchen. Angrily she “lifted a corner of her apron, swept the cards from the table into it with her hand, went to the fire and cast them from her apron into the flames. . . . She put on her bonnet and went to Philip Embury and said to him, ‘Philip you must preach to us or we shall all go to hell together, and God will require our blood at your hands!’” Embury, formerly a local preacher in Ireland, hesitantly took up her challenge and held the first service in his home. It was attended by five persons including the Hecks and their African slave. The congregation grew rapidly and in 1768 the Wesley Chapel (John Street Church), the first Methodist church in New York, was opened.
    • Paul Heck enlisted in a loyalist regiment and inevitably, in 1778, his farm was confiscated by the rebels. The Hecks, offspring of refugees, now became refugees themselves, members of the motley collection of people who were caught between the bitter proponents of the imperial government and of colonial independence.
    • Paul and Barbara Heck and their surviving children established a new home on the third concession of Augusta. They and other former Palatine families who came to this area and to the Bay of Quinte townships apparently sought to keep alive the rudiments of Methodist fellowship and discipline. These two groups were the nuclei of the first circuits in what would become the Canada Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
  • Wife of Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory –https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=3725
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/51688175/barbara-heck