Celebrating St. Matilda’s Church
/A Story of St. Matilda’s, Marmora’s Pioneer Church
Much about the first few years of St. Matilda’s Church in Marmora is lost to the fogs of time, but somethings more are known. It was started around 1825. That makes it 200 years old—and that it something to celebrate! True, not much of the building remains but anyone who has been there knows it is a blessed place.
St Matilda’s was a real outpost in the wilderness. The location was wonderful, right by the west bank of the Crowe River, very near the long-gone wooden bridge that wobbled across the wild river. It was the pride and joy of Anthony Manahan, Marmora’s second mine manager. As an Irish Catholic, in a Church of England colony, he knew how to fight for what he wanted. He wanted and got the first Catholic church so far back where none had stood before.
St. Matilda’s was already abandoned and in graceful decline by 1900.
The first priest to serve widely in the Bay of Quinte, (then styled as the Bay of Kenty), was Father Michael Brennan. His ordination was on August 28th, 1829 when he was 33. That date is the founding date for the Parish of St. Michael the Archangel.
As St. Matilda’s was by then completed, or very nearly so, it was a cornerstone of the parish and was specifically mentioned in Father Brennan’s grants of office. One can easily imagine Father Brennan arriving by horse across the shaky Crowe River bridge to lead worship in the beautiful glen beside the river. The little church charmed all who worshipped there by its location and with its simple style with plastered walls and with its plain pine benches.
The extraordinary grace and kindness of Father Brennan has kept his memory alive for two hundred years. In December 1840 Susannah Moodie, the famous settler author, her husband Sheriff Dunbar Moodie, and their children were suddenly burnt out. They lost their home, clothing, winter stores, and the greater part of their furnishings.
During the blaze, the Moodies endured their longest half hour. A servant in charge of their youngest, still two, left him behind in her flight from the doomed dwelling. He could not be located until a neighbour ran inside and found him hiding in a kitchen cupboard. He was saved unharmed. The roof is said to have then promptly collapsed. A bleak winter was setting in and their prospects looked equally bleak. The ever-entertaining Mrs. Moodie knew what Upper Canadians thought of winter. The house was surrounded by simple souls. She quoted one of them;
“Speaking of the coldness one particular day, a genuine bother, Johnathan remarked, with charming simplicity, that it had been thirty degrees below zero that morning, and it would have been much colder if the thermometer had been longer.”
Returning to her own troubles after the fire in ‘Life in the Clearings’, Susanna praises a visit by Father Brennan soon after the disaster. She was Protestant but credits the Catholic Priest’s benevolent smile, ‘courteous manner, and his racy Irish wit,’ with restoring her equilibrium.
‘You know’, she quoted him, ‘I have no family to be disturbed by the noise of the children; and if you will accept the temporary home, I offer you, it is entirely at your service.’ He continued by offering whatever funds would be needed for the family during their distress.
Not all the Moodie’s neighbours were as magnanimous, for ‘here a system of pillage was carried out by the heartless, who regard fires and wreck as their special harvest, …I saw one man pitch a handsome chamber-glass out of an upper window into the street, in order to ‘save’ it; while another, at the risk of his life carried a bottomless china jug, which had long been useless, down the burning staircase, and seemed quite elated at this success’.
