DIOCESAN ARCHIVES The Family Compact comes through

BY GLENN J LOCKWOOD

Local tradition tells us a mission was started at Cornwall in 1784 for Loyalist refugees, and by 1787, a parish was founded. The Rev. John Strachan arrived in 1803. A frame house of worship put up in 1805 prompted Strachan to opine that “Cornwall had the finest church in Upper Canada—and that in the poorest parish.”

Some things never change. Over 60 years later, when the 1805 house of worship was showing its age, there were those who doubted that funds could be found to build the size of church needed by the parish. They may have doubted that Trinity could aspire to a church designed in the splashy ecclesiastical High Victorian Gothic Revival style. They were wrong.

Some astute parishioners realized that Trinity had one thing in its favour that no other parish in the country had going for it. And that thing was an idea, or, if you will, a memory. To be specific, their first rector, the Rev. John Strachan had presided over a famous grammar school at Cornwall (famous because it had very high standards). Within its walls, he had nurtured (in an academic sense) the elite of Upper Canada known to history as the Family Compact, before going on himself to become the first (and long-lived) Bishop of Toronto, who