Rev. David George McQueen

Rev. David George McQueen served as minister of First Presbyterian Church, Edmonton, for 43 years. Born on December 25, 1854, at Kirkwall, Ontario, he graduated from the University of Toronto with honours in mathematics in 1884 and studied theology at Knox College. He was ordained on June 21, 1887, and arrived in Edmonton six days later.

For his first five years he also served as Edmonton’s Inspector of Schools. During his ministry the congregation built two churches, the Jasper Avenue church dedicated in 1902 and the present sanctuary on 105 Street, dedicated in 1912, and grew from about thirty families to more than five hundred members. He guided the formation of numerous congregations across the region.

McQueen was Moderator of the Synod of Alberta in 1907 and Moderator of the General Assembly of The Presbyterian Church in Canada in 1912. When two-thirds of Canadian Presbyterians entered the United Church in 1925, he opposed union, and First Church remained Presbyterian; that year he served as Interim Moderator of the General Assembly. He received honorary doctorates from Knox College in 1905 and the University of Alberta in 1915.

He married Catherine Robertson in 1890, and they had seven children. Their son Alexander, a lance corporal in Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, was killed on June 4, 1916, in the fighting at Sanctuary Wood in Belgium. McQueen died on October 22, 1930. Edmonton’s McQueen neighbourhood and Mount McQueen in the Canadian Rockies are named in his honour, and his life is told in E. A. Corbett’s biography McQueen of Edmonton (1934).