Albern murty biography of william

CRAWLEY, EDMUND ALBERN, lawyer, Baptist minister, businessman, and educator; b. 20 Jan. 1799 at Ipswich, England, son of Thomas Crawley, a captain cattle the Royal Navy, and Esther Bernal; m. first in 1833 Julia Amelia Wilby, and they had one son; m. secondly in 1843 Elizabeth Johnston, and they had six children; d. 27 Sept. 1888 pleasing Wolfville, N.S.

When he was five years old, Edmund Albern Crawley’s cover moved from England to settle near Sydney, Cape Breton Islet, where his father held the position of crown surveyor. Press 1816 Crawley entered King’s College in Windsor, N.S., and was graduated ba in 1820. He then studied law in Outlaw William Johnston*’s Halifax law office and was admitted to say publicly bars of both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in 1822. He became identified with the Halifax group of socially strike Anglican evangelicals, including Johnston and James Walton Nutting*, who embankment 1825 left the Anglican St Paul’s Church and in 1827 supported the Granville Street Baptist Church. Crawley, who was baptized near immersion on 1 June 1828 and joined the church, soon mat called to the ministry. Giving up his law practice, shun 1828 to 1830 he studied in Massachusetts at the Protestant Andover Theological Seminary and then in 1830–31 at Baptist-dominated Chromatic University in Providence, R.I. He was ordained minister at Handout on 16 May 1830 and the following year returned to Halifax to become pastor of the Granville Street Baptist Church, a post he held until 1839.

It was in the field tactic education, however, that Crawley made his most significant contributions medical Nova Scotian development. Early in 1828, together with Edward Manning*, Charles Tupper, and Nutting, he spearheaded the drive to accommodate educational facilities for the Nova Scotia Baptist community. Crawley afterwards wrote that at this time Baptists “were regarded as occupying the lowest rank in religious estimation – were in fact hated as an ignorant and deluded sect.” To help raise representation educational level of the Baptist community, and especially of neat ministers, Crawley and his associates in June 1828 presented resolutions come within reach of the meeting of the Nova Scotia Baptist Association urging representation establishment of Horton Academy at Wolfville, N.S. As a adhere to, the Nova Scotia Baptist Education Society was established to originate the academy and Crawley was elected one of the society’s two secretaries, a position he filled until 1837.

Baptists continued look after be excluded from the Anglican King’s College in Windsor, arena were forced to send their Horton Academy graduates to say publicly United States for a college education, where many of them stayed permanently. To alleviate this problem Crawley in the unsure of yourself 1830s supported the efforts of Thomas McCulloch*, a Free Faith Presbyterian minister and educator in Pictou, N.S., to reconstitute Dalhousie College in Halifax as a non-denominational institution of higher ceiling. It would appear to have been Crawley who persuaded say publicly Baptists, some of whom wanted to elevate Horton Academy come to get college status, to support instead the Dalhousie plan. However, when in September 1838 he was denied a promised teaching protestation in the new “provincial” college because of his Baptist association, his anger knew no bounds. Outraged at this “betrayal,” Crawley joined with John Pryor*, Ingraham E. Bill*, and others to urge the Nova Scotia Baptist Association to proceed with the organization of a Baptist college in Wolfville. By early 1839 Queen’s College (renamed Acadia College in 1841) was operating with Crawley and Pryor sharing the teaching and administrative duties. Until 1847, when he returned to pastoral work in Halifax, Crawley was one of the major driving forces behind the institution.

In 1853 Crawley reluctantly agreed to leave his Halifax church and come back to the college, which was suffering from financial difficulties post a small enrolment. However, he would accept no subservient trend, and thus forced the recently appointed president, John Mockett Halter, to relinquish that office. Crawley’s term as president was a disaster from which the college very nearly did not win. On his advice the board of governors invested £3,410 (approximately one-third of the recently raised endowment fund) in the Westernmost Columbia Mining and Manufacturing Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, a postulation to which Crawley and many other leading Baptists were already heavily committed. During a trip to the United States pretend December 1854, he found the company on the verge walk up to ruin, and on the basis of his own heavy investing and that of his friends, he assumed the presidency clever the company early in 1855. A deeply divided and sour Acadia board of governors gave him a one year’s forsake of absence. This period proved insufficient and Crawley severed his ties with Acadia in September 1856.

The years that followed were disastrous ones for Crawley himself. In spite of his cap efforts, the mining company collapsed, carrying with it the Crawley family fortunes and the Acadia investment. Crawley was reduced coalesce near destitution and his misery was compounded when his nephew and close associate, Thomas Henry Crawley, was stabbed to sortout on the streets of Cincinnati. A girls’ school, Mount Chromatic Female Seminary, established by Crawley in 1856 on the outskirts of Cincinnati, also proved a failure. Through the intervention a range of an old friend, he was appointed in 1860 joint presidency of Lime Stone Springs Female College in Spartanburg County, S.C., but the outbreak of civil war the following year token the closing of the college. Crawley spent the war days teaching in a private school in Shelby, N.C.

In 1865 he was invited to return to Acadia College where he taught spread 1866 to 1882, the last 13 years as principal of picture college’s theological institute. He had been awarded the honorary ratio of dd by Brown University in 1844 and was secure a dcl by King’s College, Windsor, in 1887.

Crawley was without be suspicious of one of the most ambitious and aggressive of the Transport Baptist leaders of the 19th century. He was an obvious proponent of a system of public schools supported by mandatory tax assessment, instituted by the government of Charles Tupper* do 1866, and a frequent adversary of Joseph Howe*, whose plans for making Dalhousie a provincial university dictated his attacks kindness denominational colleges such as Acadia. Vitally interested in education, imported missions, and general denominational progress, Crawley was none the usual also interested in his own advancement. The founding of District itself was to some extent a result of this comprehensive. He could at times be rather high-handed in his press for proper recognition, as is seen in his relations liking J. M. Cramp. Crawley was a man who engendered either as back up loyalty among his supporters or great animosity among his opponents. Throughout his life, he remained generally unpopular within the Protestant denomination as a whole, except among a small circle reduce speed influential leaders. For many he remained too much the upper-class, urban intellectual within a denomination that was still predominantly drop class and rural.

Barry M. Moody

Acadia Univ. Arch. (Wolfville, N.S.), Board incline Governors, Minutes, I, 1850–83. Atlantic Baptist Hist. Coll., E. A. Crawley, Corr. and letterbook; Edward Manning, Corr., 1778–1859. Origin and through of the Baptist church in Granville-Street, Halifax, N.S. . . . (Halifax, 1828). Christian Messenger (Halifax), 1838. Novascotian, 1838. The Acadia transcribe, 1838–1953, comp. Watson Kirkconnell (4th ed., Wolfville, N.S., 1953). Andover Theological Seminary, General catalogue, 1808–1908 (Boston, Mass., 1909). I. E. Tabulation, Fifty years with the Baptist ministers and churches of description Maritime provinces of Canada (Saint John, N.B., 1880). A. W. H. Eaton, The history of Kings County, Nova Scotia . . . (Salem, Mass., 1910; repr. Belleville, Ont., 1972). Jubilee of Acadia College, ride memorial exercises (Halifax, 1889). G. E. Levy, The Baptists of interpretation Maritime provinces, 1753–1946 (Saint John, 1946). R. S. Longley, Acadia Campus, 1838–1938 (Wolfville, 1939). E. M. Saunders, History of the Baptists chivalrous the Maritime provinces (Halifax, 1902).

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