his actual mission as well as in Lot 49 some ten miles east of Charlottetown. Finally, in the autumn of 1824, Mr. Jenkins went to live at St. Eleanors where he was able in May of the next year to erect the frame of a church, the first exclusively Anglican structure on the Island. He also organized a congregation at Bideford some miles west, where a shipbuilding concern, originally owned by J. Burnard and Company, and then by Thomas Burnard Chanter, had begun operation in 1818.

Bishop John Inglis, accompanied by the Reverend Edward Wix (later Archdeacon of Newfoundland), visited Charlottetown in October, 1826, just as Mr. Adin left for England in ill-health and despair. The Bishop drove forty-two miles to St. Eleanors to see the new church, still incomplete partly because some of the com- munity’s ready money, a scarce commodity, had been given to relieve sufferers in the great fire of Miramichi. In Charlottetown Bishop Inglis confirmed a number of candidates who came from different parts of the Island.

Meanwhile, according to tradition, Mr. Jenkins held occasional services for the New London flock in a log schoolhouse near the shore on land then owned by John Adams, a spot which may be reached today by following the unused “Government” road directly east of the present St. Thomas’s church. The frame of the first church was built in the summer of 1826 on the site of the present building, but it had a life of only a few weeks as it blew down in an autumn storm. That the congregation was not daunted by this poor start is clear from a report made by Archdeacon Willis, Bishop Inglis’ commissary and successor as rector of St. Paul’s, Halifax, who visited the Island in the summer of the following year, 1827. He wrote that in New London an excellent frame, with a gallery, had already been erected, with a small chancel to extend from the eastern end, and that the people had means in hand to proceed with the furnishing of the church. Mr. Jenkins wrote from St. Eleanors to the Bishop and the S.P.G. as follows:

The Archdeacon visited us in September and appeared much satisfied with the progress made here. I accompanied him to Princetown about twenty miles from St. Eleanors Where he had an interview with three or four respectable persons who compose a committee for the erection of a church here. A gentleman also waited upon the Arch- deacon from New London, a flourishing settlement about ten miles distant who is at the head of a similar under- taking at that place. About £100 have been subscribed both at Princetown and New London toward each church, and the frame is already erected and a sufficient quantity of boards procured to cover it at the latter place. From the information I could obtain there are about twenty heads of families at Princetown and thirty at New London mem- bers of the Church, besides many individuals well affected to it. They have expressed their willingness to comply with the Society’s usual requisitions, and would esteem it a most important blessing to be favoured with the actual services of a missionary clergyman. At the suggestion of

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