the name of Mrs. Jesse Saunders, although there is no account of a marriage to a Saunders, thought to be a travelling salesman. Rumour had it that she ran a bordello. Eventually she turned up in Tampico, Mexico, where she died in poverty in 1925. Her sister, Eva Jane, visited her in 1917 and members of the family mailed money to her from time to time. Unfortunately, it seems she never received any of it as the envelopes had been slit open and the cash removed.
Near the turn of the century, Martha Amanda’s second husband died and she was once again a widow without an income. She wrote to a man she had met on the train during her honeymoon trip with Wilson, a G.A. Bayne from Victoria, British Columbia. They married in Calgary on May 12, 1909, when the bride was sixty-seven. Martha Amanda went west with him, but would soon return to Ontario. Later Bayne came east, but Martha Amanda declined to follow him out west again. After he died in 1921, Martha Amanda travelled from one daughter’s establishment to another until her death in 1930. The frail Martha Amanda, thrice widowed, lived to be 87 years of age.
Sarah and George Sutton Weir with Ethel Ruth, born 1886. The photograph taken in Tawas City in 1888.
The year following his marriage, George Sutton Weir, still on trial by the church fathers, was assigned to Alcona and Black River in the Alpena District. In 1884 he had been classed as a travelling second class deacon and assigned to Tawas City in the Alpena District. Two years later, he became the Reverend George Sutton Weir, admitted to full connection, elected and ordained deacon, and remained in the same charge. Sarah and George’s first child, Ethel Ruth, was born in their home in Black River that same year.
A riding circuit was an exhausting business as Sarah well knew from her father’s experiences. The average extent of a circuit had a preacher travelling for two weeks at a time, home on Saturday to prepare for the Sabbath and then out on his circuit again, relying on the faithful to feed and house him overnight. This was a lonely time for Sarah, far from her relatives and home, and with a little baby to care for as well.
In 1888 George was elected and ordained elder at the Conference held in Detroit from September 12 to 18. His Tawas City appointment was renewed, which must have come as a happy relief to Sarah, for her son, George Harrison, was born there that same year. The following year the little family was uprooted and sent to Laingsburg in the Saginaw District.
It was while he was stationed in Tawas City, now a resort area on Lake Huron, and ministering to the communities on his circuit situated on water courses emptying into the lake, that George contracted malaria and became very ill. Many struggling hamlets were subjected to epidemics of malaria from the mosquitoes in the swampy surroundings and some were completely depopulated. While Sarah and her babies seem to have escaped, George’s health was seriously impaired. Desperate to try anything to restore his well being, he took courses in popular new alternatives to traditional medicine, appealing, if not widely understood or researched. He obtained an M.E. Diploma as Master of Electro Therapeutics from the National College of Electro Therapeutics in Lima, Ohio, and a Ph.G degree from the Ohio Institute of Pharmacy in Columbus, Ohio, the latter institution being on the Homeopathic Register. There is no record of George travelling to Ohio, so it must be assumed that these were mail order degrees. Apparently these studies did not help to improve his health.
One of George’s last duties in Tawas City was on June 20, 1889, when he gave the Benediction at the First Annual Commencement Exercise of the Tawas City Public Schools, in the Opera House at 7:30 pm, a source of pride and gratification to the young minister. After having served the Alpena District of the Detroit Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, George, still suffering from his malaria bout, was sent south to Laingsburg in the Saginaw District in the fall of 1889. The little family was no doubt thankful to be uprooted this time and to leave the mosquito infested shores of Lake Huron. On Christmas Day 1889, George was the officiating clergyman at the wedding of his brother, Samuel Weir, to Caroline Voss in Oswego, Illinois. The following year, George was assigned on a supernumerary preacher status, which means temporarily without employment, usually due to illness or family problems.
Later George would write of his early experiences as a minister:
The Presiding Elder did not think they paid me properly. He refused to return me for another year and sent me to Alcona and Black River. I had no conveyance and had to do my work on foot. I walked eight miles to preach and had to walk the eight miles back to preach and look after the Sunday School. I finally moved to Black River, where my daughter was born. I was moved to Tawas City because the preacher, W.J. Balmer, claimed he had been unfairly dealt with and the church was torn to pieces. The members were divided and unfriendly to each other. Mr. Balmer did not try to bring about peace and helped the trouble to become worse. Another trouble arose. The town was supported by a saw-mill which depended on Canadian logs. When the supply of logs was cut off there was no work for the mill to do and the people had no means of support except a little work they picked up on the shore loading and unloading boats on shore. My family had but little to support them. Here I was taken sick with a most malignant type of malaria. I never recovered entirely from the malaria and still feel bad effects from it at times. I still trust and love my dear Saviour and my prayer is,
‘More love to thee, oh Christ, more love to thee,
E’en tho it be a cross that raises me.’
George and Sarah took stock and decided to pack up and come back home to London. Their hopes for George’s career as a rising young minister were dashed. “He never fully recovered,” according to Sarah many years later. As he had not been an outstanding success at teaching before he entered the ministry, he did not resume that choice of career. George had a low level of tolerance when it came to high spirited young people and had left London early in his teaching career, probably while he was still in his teens. Insistent on obedience, he set strict rules of behaviour. A story was told of him that when a young lad behaved in a manner that George considered to be obstreporous, he punished the boy and the parents considered the punishment too severe. In the nineteenth century this would have been the strap or caning. The parents complained to the principal. George Sutton’s reply to the parents was a couplet:
“You are all ass but ears, So don’t you meddle with the Weirs.”
His country school teaching first in Bruce, and later Lambton counties, began shortly after the undiplomatic rebuke.
The little family arrived back home in London in 1890, but George Sutton’s careers in education and the ministry were both in tatters and the family breadwinner’s health was permanently undermined by malaria. The future looked uncertain.
3 AN IMPROVED BEGINING
ONCE BACK IN LONDON, GEORGE SUTTON WEIR TOOK WHAT employment he could find, some odd jobs and sometimes as a conductor on London’s street railways. The family moved into a small house at 795 York Street in London’s east end, a working man’s district. It was a modest dwelling similar to a number of others on the street, with no means of heating other than a fireplace. All their lives the Weir children suffered from colds, bronchitis and pneumonia and it may well be that constantly being cold as small children contributed to the weakness in their lungs. Indeed the next few years were very difficult ones for the little family. There is no record of George ever attempting to preach on a regular basis again, although the family attended church with great regularity. George probably felt that his health was not up to the rigorous demands made on a preacher or a circuit rider and, as well, he was not connected with The Toronto Conference.
In 1895 another daughter, Martha Frances Irene, was born on July 12. As Sarah’s struggles to keep the little family clothed and fed increased, she did dressmaking. One of her customers, Mrs. Robarts, was
