Ryerson , Eggerton

DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: R. D. Gidney, “RYERSON, EGERTON (Adolphus Egerton),” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 11, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ryerson_egerton_11E.html
DCB profile notes:
- Methodist minister, author, editor, and educational administrator; b. 24 March 1803 in Charlotteville Township, Norfolk County, Upper Canada, fifth son of Joseph Ryerson and Mehetable Stickney; m. first 10 Sept. 1828 Hannah Aikman (d. 1832) at Hamilton, Upper Canada, and they had two children; m. secondly 8 Nov. 1833 Mary Armstrong at York (Toronto), Upper Canada, and they had two children; d. 19 Feb. 1882 at Toronto.
- Two circumstances in Egerton Ryerson’s early life exercised a lasting influence on his career. One was the loyalist environment in which he grew up. His father, Joseph, and his uncle Samuel Ryerse, both American born, had served as loyalist officers in the American revolution and afterwards had fled north to New Brunswick before moving to Upper Canada in the 1790s. Among the Ryerson family, memories of pioneering a new land and defending it, of principles sustained and loyalty reaffirmed, would breed a deep and abiding attachment to both their native land and the maintenance of the British connection in North America.
- The second great formative influence was evangelical Christianity. Like so many of his generation Ryerson was touched early in life by the wave of Protestant revivalism that swept North America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
- During these years the rigorous routine of a travelling preacher’s life was interrupted by two diversions that would put Ryerson’s name before a much wider audience than any Methodist circuit could offer. In 1826 a sermon, delivered the previous summer at the funeral of Bishop Jacob Mountain by John Strachan, appeared in print; in it Strachan, the leading Church of England clergyman in Upper Canada, traced the rise of the Anglican church in the colony, contending that it was the established church and attacking the Methodists as ignorant American enthusiasts, unsound in religion and disloyal in politics. None of the arguments were new, but on this occasion the Methodists in York chose not to remain silent and Ryerson, still a probationary preacher, was one of those invited to frame a reply. In a long letter printed in the Colonial Advocate (York) in May 1826 he challenged all of Strachan’s assertions. No less than Strachan himself, Ryerson sought a society that was both Christian and British. His forays against Strachan brought Ryerson to the centre of Methodist affairs.
- Ryerson’s life spans the growth of Upper Canada virtually from first settlement to the social and economic maturity of the 1870s. For most of those years he was a major figure in its history. Particularly before 1850 he played a central part in the institutional growth of Methodism, one of the province’s largest denominations. As well, he helped to articulate and publicize “the grievances of Upper Canada,” and contributed to the debate about the nature of colonial-imperial relations. If most historians now reject an older view that Ryerson determined single-handed the results of the elections of 1836 and 1844, still he remains an influential figure in these events and one of the leading spokesmen for that majority of Upper Canadians who sought some middle way to reconcile self-government and the imperial tie.
- But it is his contribution to Canadian education that remains his greatest legacy. He was one of the founders of Victoria College, its first principal, and a generous benefactor through some of its most difficult years. He was a vigorous protagonist of the right of all the denominational colleges to survive and prosper in the province. And he attempted to make the grant-aided schools universal and comprehensive and to create an effective system of public administration at both the local and provincial levels.
- Few of his educational ideas were original. John Strachan, for one, had anticipated many of them, while others were the common coinage of an era when school systems were being constructed in many different places. Nor was his vision without flaws. He had an unsure hand when it came to providing for the advanced education of young women. To some of his contemporaries his version of non-denominationalism in education appeared as little more than a disguised and proselytizing form of evangelical Protestantism. And his hopes for social improvement through education were vitiated by a belief, widely shared by his generation, that social and economic inequalities were the unchangeable realities of man’s fallen estate. During his lifetime there were already divergent views about the merits of the school system, and since his death the assessments of his work have been diverse and conflicting. But on one point there has been consensus. More than any other person Ryerson gave the Ontario school system its particular character, one that, because of his enormous influence in his own generation, would become during the later 19th century a model for most of English-speaking Canada.
Son of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=7251
Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/10846660/adolphus-egerton-ryerson