Rev. Andrew Browning Baird

Rev. Andrew Browning Baird was the founding minister of First Presbyterian Church, Edmonton. He was born on October 6, 1855, at Motherwell in what is now Ontario, and studied at the University of Toronto (BA 1877, MA 1880), at New College, Edinburgh (BD 1881) and at the University of Leipzig.

Ordained in August 1881, he reached Edmonton that November, before the railway. After an organizational meeting on November 3 in Jimmy McDonald’s carpentry shop, he conducted the first Presbyterian service ever held in Edmonton, or in what is now the Province of Alberta, on November 6, 1881. Under his ministry the congregation built its first permanent home in 1882, and in 1885 he helped establish a mission school at Stony Plain.

In 1887 Baird left Edmonton for Manitoba College in Winnipeg, where he taught for fifty years as lecturer, professor, librarian and acting principal before retiring in 1937. He was elected Moderator of the General Assembly of The Presbyterian Church in Canada in 1916. When church union came in 1925 he joined the new United Church of Canada and became the first president of its Manitoba Conference, while the congregation he had founded in Edmonton remained Presbyterian.

A scholar of wide interests, he was a member of the Royal Numismatic Society and president of the Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba. He died in Winnipeg on September 22, 1940.