By Taylor Murray

Dealing with snow (and other forms of winter weather) is part of the Canadian experience.

From November to April, many parts of the country have to deal with excessive snowfall amounts and freezing weather. Recently, I came across a letter from March 1904 written by a Baptist pastor in Ontario, P. K. Dayfoot, in which he bemoaned the harsh winter weather of that year.¹ He was writing for a Baptist periodical based out of Kentucky, and he made sure to let his audience know exactly how the snow had affected Baptist ministry north of the border.

He opened the letter by describing what Ontarians had experienced:

“We are just emerging from a severe winter. The oldest inhabitants declare that they cannot remember anything like it; and the Director of the Provincial Observatory, whose record is more reliable than the memory of any person, reports the lowest average temperature by twelve degrees in seventy-four years. Moreover, it has been a season of phenomenal snow-fall. The first snow came November 16, 1903, and there has been no thaw, but constant snow-storms.”

This extreme weather, he noted, had affected day-to-day life in Ontario for many people. “The railways have suffered seriously,” he added, “Traffic has been demoralized[,] Freight business has dwindled[,] Blockades and accidents have abounded.”

This brought him to his point: “Church work has also suffered.” The same inclement weather that had frustrated commerce and travel had also affected Baptist ministries. It was apparently normal for rural churches to be “closed for weeks,” and even those that were open had limited services that were “meagerly attended.” In the city, the story was a little different, but not much better, as “the average attendance dropped [by] one third.”

As he summed, this had caused a “serious disturbance of plans.” Throughout the season, they had to cancel evangelistic services and fundraising efforts. In the latter case, one other denomination had estimated a loss of as much as $100,000.00 due to cancelled missionary meetings.² The consequences for these Baptists—and other denominations—were serious.

The remainder of the letter briefly outlined a few positive stories of more recent events,³ likely in an effort to demonstrate the resilience of the Baptists in Ontario in the face of these challenges.

As I read through the letter, my mind went back to the Canadian winters I have experienced where it felt like the snow would never stop. At the same time, however, as a historian, I was reminded that it is important to look for external factors as we research. If one were to look at a spreadsheet that contained only the numerical figures from this particular winter season, we would note a significant drop in church attendance and missionary fundraising (among other changes). Removed from their context, these data could lead one to surmise that Baptists had become less interested in denominational life for a time in 1904. But as we know from the above letter, that was not necessarily the case.

Although this letter is a fairly pedestrian example, I think the lesson remains the same: history does not happen in a vacuum—but it can happen in a snowstorm.

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Taylor Murray, PhD, is Instructor of Christian History and Creative Producer of Distributed Learning at Tyndale University in Toronto. He is the Webmaster of the Canadian Baptist Historical Society and Managing Editor of The Bulletin of the Canadian Baptist Historical Society.

Endnotes

1. All quotes from this letter in this blog are from P. K. Dayfoot, “Ontario Letter,” The Baptist Argus, 3 March 1904, 1. ↩︎
2. This amount is equivalent to over $2.5 million in today’s dollars. ↩︎
3. Including a series of preaching services from later-fundamentalist leader T. T. Shields, who ran a very popular evangelistic campaign at the time. ↩︎

**The views of this Blog represent those of the author, and not necessarily the CBHS.**