Baptists in Early North America-Wolfville, Nova Scotia

Readers of the BENA Series will immediately recognize that this series does not follow the traditional ""Baptists in the United States"" or ""Baptists in America"" organizing pattern. Especially in the colonial period, the division between the Thirteen Colonies and the Canadas and Maritimes was secondary in light of a unified political culture under British colonial administration. As Morgan Edwards saw it, the Baptist religious community stretched from Nova Scotia to Georgia before the Revolution. Volume XI specifically illustrates the presence of Nova Scotia Baptists in the transatlantic community. In the late colonial period, the Maritime Provinces in British North America were a frontier to the emerging American colonies in the process of becoming a new nation. In addition to the administration of His Majesty's government there were significant influences from the New England colonies. From 1760 scores of families from the six New England colonies emigrated especially to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, known as ""planters."" They were later joined by the United Empire Loyalists who fled the American Revolution to remain loyal to their King. Their settlements, villages, ports, and farms resettled the old Acadian lands and, happily for the British, they anglicized French Maritime Canada. In the historical introduction, Roger Prentice informatively demonstrates the theological and polity formation of a congregation made up of planters and the next generations. How the Baptist movement came to be in Canada is Wolfville's story: it is the oldest continuing Baptist congregation in Canada.