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A short history of the churches of Fergus and Elora

How Fergus and Elora's churches began: Scottish Presbyterians in the 1830s, Anglicans, Methodists and Catholics, and Reformed churches founded after 1945.

Deo Gloria, . 4 minute read.

Both Fergus and Elora were founded by Scots in the early 1830s, and in both a church was among the first buildings raised. What follows is a short, sourced account of how the congregations of Centre Wellington came to be, from the first Presbyterian services to the Reformed churches founded by Dutch immigrants after 1945.

Two Scottish villages

Elora came first. Captain William Gilkison, from Ayrshire, bought fourteen thousand acres on the Grand River in 1832 and had a village laid out, naming it after his brother’s ship, which had in turn been named for the Ellora caves of India. He died the following spring, but the settlement survived him.

Fergus was founded in 1833 by two Scots, Adam Fergusson and James Webster, who by an unwritten rule that lasted until about 1850 sold land only to Scottish settlers. A sawmill, a grist mill, a school and a church all went up in 1835. In 1999 the two were amalgamated with the townships of Nichol, Pilkington and West Garafraxa and part of Eramosa to form the Township of Centre Wellington.

The Presbyterians

Fergus was a Presbyterian town from the start. Adam Fergusson laid the cornerstone of St. Andrew’s Church on November 30, 1834, on a rise known as the Glebe, and the frame church with its tin spire opened on August 23, 1835. The present St. Andrew’s, a stone Gothic Revival building designed by David Murray of Guelph, replaced it on the same site in 1862.

In 1843 the Church of Scotland split, and the split crossed the ocean. The Rev. George Smellie, inducted at St. Andrew’s that December, returned from a meeting of Presbyterian ministers in Kingston in 1844 persuaded of the Free Church cause and took most of the congregation with him: of 449 members, 360 followed. They named their new church after Andrew Melville, the Scottish reformer, and opened a stone building seating four hundred on March 4, 1847. In 1900 the congregation opened the larger stone church that still stands at Tower and St. Andrew streets. At the formation of the United Church of Canada in 1925 it became Melville United, and the town’s Wesley Methodist congregation, founded in 1852, joined it soon after.

Elora’s Presbyterians began in 1837 at Bon Accord, a settlement of Scottish families in Nichol Township, worshipping in a log church. In 1850 Charles Allan gave them land in the village, and in 1873 they built the stone Knox Church that stands on Church Street today.

Anglicans, Methodists and Catholics

The Anglican parish of St. John the Evangelist in Elora built its first church in 1842 at the south end of the village; the present church, designed by Henry Langley, dates from the 1870s. In Fergus, Anglicans built the first St. James Church in 1867 and replaced it in 1895.

Methodist preachers passed through Elora from the 1830s, and by the 1840s the Wesleyans had a chapel at Victoria and McNab streets. In 1862 they began the church at Church and Geddes streets that opened the following spring, the first of Elora’s major church buildings. It is still in use: since November 2022 it has been home to Hope Springs United, formed by amalgamating the Elora, Bethany and Alma congregations.

Catholics were a small minority in these Presbyterian villages. Elora’s first Catholic church, a small building on McNab Street, went up in 1854 on land given by Robert Gilkison, the founder’s son. The cornerstone of St. Mary Immaculate, on the high ground of Geddes Street, was laid in May 1870. St. Joseph’s parish in Fergus was established in 1854 and opened its church in 1869; in 1872 it became a mission of the larger Elora parish. Its present church on St. David Street North was dedicated in September 2011.

The Dutch, and the Reformed churches

The next great change came a century later. Between the late 1940s and the 1970s some 185,000 people left the Netherlands for Canada, most of them in the decade after the war, and more settled in Ontario than anywhere else. They brought their churches with them. Those from the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (Liberated), which had gone through a painful split in 1944, founded the Canadian Reformed Churches, instituting their first congregation at Lethbridge, Alberta, on April 16, 1950. Others joined the Christian Reformed Church, which by 1960 had planted half of its new congregations in Canada.

In Fergus, the Maranatha Canadian Reformed Church was instituted on January 15, 1956, and new congregations followed. Guelph received its own on January 1, 1974. The Canadian Reformed Church of Elora was founded on September 6, 1987, with fifteen members, and built its church and manse outside Salem in 1991. On July 11, 2004, Fergus North branched off from Maranatha, moving into its own building on First Line in December 2014. And in February 2022 members of the Elora and Fergus North congregations helped form a new church in Arthur.

The churches today

The township now lists more than twenty places of worship: the Presbyterian, United and Anglican congregations descended from the founders; the two Catholic parishes; three Canadian Reformed churches; Baptist, Lutheran, Mennonite and Pentecostal congregations; and several newer fellowships. Nearly two centuries after Adam Fergusson laid a cornerstone on the Glebe, the two towns are still church towns. Every one of these congregations is listed on this site, and the local Reformed church is among them.

Sources

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