From: William Day

I have spent hours poring over a collage (above; click to enlarge) depicting eleven Yarmouth churches that were active at the beginning of the twentieth century. I felt inadequate because I recognized so few of them and knew so little about them. Where were they located? Why were they built? What has happened to them?

While investigating such questions I found many fascinating, sometimes beautiful, images of Yarmouth’s churches. I have gathered them into photo albums that eventually I will post to this website. The albums, and the churches in the collage that they feature, are:

1. Yarmouth’s Early Meeting Houses
   

2.     New Zion Baptist
   

3. Yarmouth’s Episcopal Churches
   

4.     Holy Trinity
   

5. Yarmouth’s Methodist Churches
   

6.     Providence Church, Wesley Church
   

7. Hard Times in Yarmouth’s Pulpits
   

8.     St. John’s Presbyterian Church, New Tabernacle
   

9. Yarmouth’s Roman Catholic Churches
   

10.     St. Ambrose Church
    

11. Yarmouth’s Baptist Churches
    

12.     Milton Baptist, Temple Baptist, Free Baptist
    

Of the eleven churches one remains to be mentioned but, lest you mistakenly associate it with the west coast entertainment industry, let me introduce the man for whom Disney Chapel was named.

Richard Randolph Disney, born 24 June 1830 in North East, Maryland, was a black Methodist minister, bishop, and editor. In 1857 he was licensed to preach by the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AMEC), which subsequently ordained him deacon and elder. In 1857 Disney came to Upper Canada to minister to the many blacks who had sought refuge there from slavery in the years prior to the United States Civil War. In 1875 he became an AMEC bishop with administrative responsibilities for Ontario, Nova Scotia, Bermuda, the West Indies, and British Guyana. In 1888 Disney was reassigned to a district with churches in Arkansas and Mississippi. He was stricken by malaria, went to Baltimore to recover, and died there on 20 April 1891 in his sixty-first year. His body was returned to Canada, where he was buried in Chatham, Ontario. [1]

Disney Chapel, at 10 East Street in Yarmouth, was built by Robert P. Kelley, a local architect who had also designed St. John’s Presbyterian Church on Kirk Street. It was consecrated and opened for public worship on Sunday, 4 November 1877, in services conducted by Right Rev. Bishop Richard Disney and Rev. Walter Grayson, pastor of the church. [2, p. 535]

As the years passed, it became ever more difficult to maintain the church building. In the late 1930s Disney Chapel was forced to close its doors. It opened again, closed again, opened again, and at some point the congregation became affiliated with the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. Today the Chapel is called the Sharon Gospel Assembly. [3]

References and Notes

    [1] J. William Lamb, author of “Disney, Richard Randolph” in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, 1891–1900 (Volume XII).

    [2] J. Murray Lawson, Yarmouth Past and Present: A Book of Reminiscences. Yarmouth Herald, Yarmouth NS, 1902. 681 pp.

    [3] Sharon Robart-Johnson, Africa’s Children: A History of Blacks in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Dundurn Press, Toronto ON, 2009. 240 pp.

    [4] I thank Jamie Serran, Archivist at the Yarmouth County Museum and Archives, for providing access to the images of the collage (PH–16–1) and Disney Chapel (2004–275.22). I found the image of Richard Disney at a blog entitled “Blood in the Mortar: The Abolition–Emancipation Movement in Guelph, Ontario.” I took the last photo in March 2012.