Excerpt from The Pioneer Pastor: Some Reminiscences of the Life and Labors of the Rev. Geo Buchanan, First Presbyterian Minister of Beckwith, Lanark County, Upper Canada

It was decided to ask the Presbytery of Edinburgh to select and send a suitable minister. A call was prepared, signed by nearly all the adults and forwarded in due course. This important document stipulated that the man to be chosen must be of godly carriage and conversation, well qualified to expound the Scriptures, gifted in prayer, skilled in the practice of medicine and able to preach in Gaelic and English. If the petitioners thought their request would be com plied with easily, they reckoned without their host. The Presbytery found it very diificult to find a competent minister willing to accept the position. Few of the ministers were physicians and fewer cared to leave flourishing charges for the chance of missionary success in a distant land. Even to ambitious divinity-students the prospect was not particularly alluring. Canada Seemed a long way off.. The age of steam and electricity had not been ushered in. Sailing vessels, slow, uncomfortable and unsafe, furnished the sole means. Of traversing the ocean. Popular imagination pictured the r�gions west of the Atlantic as interminable forests, through which wild beasts and still wilder Indians roamed at will. Central Africa appeared less remote and more inviting than the land beyond the St. Lawrence. So Beckwith's Mace domian cry received no prompt response, weeks and months passing before it could be answered satisfactorily.

Eventually the Presbytery urged my father, the Rev. George Buchanan, M. D., then ministering to a church in the Scottish capital, to go to Beckwith. He possessed abundant qualifications for the responsible task. Although Sixty years old, his eye was not dimmed, nor his natural force abated. His ripe experience as a pastor and physician, rare tact, profound knowledge, prudent zeal and persuasive eloquence were simply invaluable. Born at cupar-angus. In 1761, the youngest child of Donald Buchanan, a prosperous Highland farmer, he came of goodly stock. 'his father, left a widower with ten children, for his second wife married Catharine Menzies, who belonged to a family noted for its high character, intelligence and thrift. She bore him a daughter and a son, the latter George, the baby of the household. Donald Buchanan traced his lineage through a worthy ancestry back to the days of Wallace and Bruce. The celebrated George Buchanan, one of the Scots Worthies and tutor of King James, sprang from the same stem. Claudius Buchanan, the distinguished writer and mission ary to' India, and the late Hon. Isaac Buchanan, * the Canadian states man and merchant-prince, were our kinsmen.

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