The Cemetery on the Nith: Reverend Francis Pickle

Francis Pickle (1773-1860), Riverside
Baptist Cemetery, Blenheim, Oxford, Ontario

Another New Brunswick migrant with Loyalist roots was the Reverend Francis Pickle.¹ According to his obituary,² he was the second pastor of Riverside Baptist Church. At the time Francis was a minister, two branches of the Baptist Church were active in Upper Canada. Riverside was a Close Communion Baptist Church. Only members of the church in good standing were allowed to receive communion. Also active were the Free Will Baptists who permitted open communion.

Francis was born in Alexandria Township, Hunterdon County, New Jersey in 1773 to Nicholas Pickle (1745-1843) and Rachel Inscoe (1756-1806). Alexandria sits on the Delaware River on the border between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Francis’s father was likely also born in Alexandria Township.

The consensus is that Nicholas was the son of Franz Wilhelm Pickle (1722-1786) who had been born in Bad Durkheim in the Palatinate but had emigrated with his parents to New Jersey about 1727. Nicholas’s mother, Sophia Phidia Van Horne (1726-1764), had been born at New Germantown³ in Tewksbury Township, Hunterdon County. Rachel Inscoe, the daughter of Joseph Inscoe (1725-1790) and Ann Wohlenben (1731-1763) was likely born in what is now Warren County, New Jersey.

During the Revolutionary War, Nicholas Pickle, a blacksmith, “suffered many abuses and was brought to death’s door by trials and menaces.” After independence was declared in July 1776, Nicholas refused to swear the oath of allegiance and was fined £30. He was later imprisoned several times. In October 1777 he “broke out of prison loaded with irons” and escaped to Philadelphia, then occupied by the British.

In Philadelphia, Nicolas worked for the British first as a wagoner then as a blacksmith. His wife and son likely joined Nicholas in Philadelphia, and he and his family accompanied the British when they withdrew to New York in June of 1778. In New York, Nicholas worked for several years as a carpenter for the British.

Loyalist Landing by Adam Sheriff Scott

When the British began evacuating New York in 1783, Nicholas and his family embarked on one of the transport ships of the Spring Fleet that carried over 1700 Loyalist refugees to the mouth of the Saint John River, arriving there in May 1783.

Unlike many refugees who were remained in Parr Town⁴ until they received their grants upriver, Nicholas headed inland and spent his first winter in New Brunswick squatting on the northwest side of Kennebacasis River in what in 1795 became Norton Parish, Kings County, New Brunswick.

The following summer, Nicholas was granted official title to two lots of 200 acres each on the Kennebacasis. In 1796 he was granted an additional 200 acres.

On 6 Feb 1787, Nicholas appeared before the Loyalist Claims Commission and claimed losses totalling £521 which included furniture, a wagon, six horses, oxen, sheep, cattle, hogs, blacksmith’s tools, and the fines paid for refusing to take the oath. He produced evidence that his household property in Alexandria Township had been confiscated and sold in 1779.

Francis was the first child of Nicholas and Rachel. A child may have been born while they were in New York, as a list of civilian Loyalists intending to sail to Saint John records both a child, ten and above (Francis), and a child under ten. Several sources state that their son John, who died in 1818, was born in 1778. Other sources place John birth in 1787. What is known for certain is that a John Pickle of Kings County petitioned the New Brunswick government for land in 1808, and received 250 acres in Hampton Parish, Kings County in 1812.

Nicholas and Rachel had at least seven more children, born when the family was safely in New Brunswick: Rachel (1784-1843), Joseph (1785-1871), Mary (1787-1871), Elizabeth (1794-1838), Jane (1795-1835), Julia (1796- ?), and Ruth Ann (1798-1870). Joseph migrated to Upper Canada and settled in Burford, Brant around the same time that Francis came to Blenheim Township. Mary’s husband Peter Molaskey (1777-1848) also brought his family to Burford. Mary died at the age of 84 and was buried at the Burford Congregational Cemetery.

Nicholas and Rachel moved to Hampton Parish, Kings County sometime before Rachel’s death in January of 1806. Nicholas remarried within two years and eventually moved to Upham Parish, Kings County where he died on 16 Jun 1843 at the age of 97. His second wife, Catherine, died the same year at the age of 80.

Kings County, New Brunswick

Francis Pickle married Jane Dickie, the eldest daughter of Hector Dickie (1743-1837) and Sarah Walker. Jane was born in 1776 in the Ninety Six District of South Carolina. Jane and Francis's first child, Rachel, was born in 1796. Francis and Jane had at least eight children. Their son, Hector Dickie Pickle, who died in 1805 at the age of 3, is thought to be have been the first burial in Norton’s Baptist cemetery.

In 1811, Francis Pickle became a deacon of the Norton Baptist Church, founded in 1800. In 1824 he was ordained as its pastor. Prior to his involvement in the church, Francis had been an innkeeper in Norton.

The precise date when Francis left New Brunswick for Upper Canada is not known. One published source⁵ claims Francis came to Upper Canada with his son Nicholas in 1842. Francis, however, is recorded as having performed marriages in Blenheim, Burford, and Townsend townships in 1833 and 1834, while Nicholas appears on the list of Blenheim’s Overseers of Highways or Pathmasters for 1833 and 1834, and on militia muster rolls for 1838 and 1839.

Jane Pickle 1776-1849, St Abner's
Cemetery, Brantford, Brant, Ontario

The 1857 Tremaine Map shows that Francis Pickle owned the 100 acre east half of Lot 10 Concession 4 Blenheim. The 1876 Illustrated Historical Atlas of the County of Oxford, shows that after Francis’s death, the property had been acquired by William Pinkham, the son of his daughter Rachel Pickle and her husband Hanson Pinkham. Rachel had sailed with her children from Saint John to New York in 1831, presumably to join her husband in Upper Canada.

When Francis’s wife Jane died in 1849 she was buried at St Abner Cemetery near Burford beside others members of the Dickie Family. Francis then married the much younger Elizabeth Nice (1810-1884), daughter of John Nice (1781-1836) and Margaret Walker (1783-1856) who had also brought their family to Upper Canada from Kings County, New Brunswick.

Francis died in 1860 at the age of 87 and was buried at Riverside. Elizabeth remarried and is also buried at Riverside. Of Francis’s eleven children, only Rachel is buried there.

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¹  Alternate spellings include Pickel and Bickle.
²  Reprinted in Shenston, Thomas S. A Jubilee Review of the First Baptist Church, Brantford, 1833 to 1884. Toronto: Bingham & Webber, 1890.
³  Renamed Oldwick during the First World War.
⁴  Parr Town combined with Carleton in 1785 to become the City of Saint John.
⁵  Pickle, Weldon. Ancestors and Descendants of the Sherwood and Pickel U. E. Loyalists in Canada. Self-published, 1949.