Young, Egerton Ryerton

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Jennifer S. H. Brown, “YOUNG, EGERTON RYERSON,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 13, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/young_egerton_ryerson_13E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Teacher, Methodist missionary, lecturer, and author; b. 7 April 1840 in Crosby Township, Upper Canada, son of the Reverend William Young and Amanda Waldron; m. 25 Dec. 1867, in Toronto, Elizabeth Bingham of Bradford, Ont., and they had eight children, of whom four daughters and one son survived infancy; d. 5 Oct. 1909 in Bradford and was buried in Bowmanville, Ont.
    • Egerton Ryerson Young’s relation to his namesake, Methodist leader and educator Egerton Ryerson, was religious and cultural, not genealogical. Both his father and his mother’s brother Solomon Waldron were itinerant Wesleyan Methodist preachers and “cotemporaries,” of the Ryersons and William Case. Family ties infused Young’s childhood with the rural evangelical Methodism of an itinerant church not yet dominated by the urbanism of the later 1800s.
    • During 1860–61 he pursued a strenuous course of study at the Toronto Model School, learning to teach almost every subject. “I wish that I was born before nerves were invented,” he wrote on facing a class at the Toronto Normal School. But he enjoyed meeting Egerton Ryerson who, “in spite of the blaggurding and rubs, that he gets . . . is the most popular man in Toronto.”
    • Ordained on 9 June 1867 in Hamilton, Young was called to the pastorate of the First Methodist Church there. Early in 1868, however, his superiors invited him to become a missionary to the natives of Rupert’s Land. Consulting and praying with his new wife, Elizabeth, he asked for her sentiments about this unexpected call. “I think it is from God and we will go,” she answered. The Youngs thus joined a group of Wesleyans bound for Rupert’s Land.
    • In May 1887 Mark Guy Pearse, a distinguished English Wesleyan, visited Young at Meaford. Noting his preaching and storytelling abilities, he invited Young to England and urged him to apply his speaking and writing skills to the needed task of “renewing the popular interest in foreign missionary enterprise.” In 1888 Young, unhappy with the pastorates offered him in Ontario, took up the challenge and made an extended lecture tour of the eastern United States. Its success was repeated in the British Isles the next spring and thereafter in other cities across North America. In 1890 appeared the first of over a dozen books based on his mission experience, By canoe and dog-train among the Cree and Salteaux Indians, which went through numerous editions. Its illustrations, with other images from many sources, provided the basis for a large collection of lanternslides to stir audiences and promote missions.
  • Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=5028
  • Find A Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/63593690/egerton-ryerson-young