Thomas Burns

This article deals with the pastor and colonialist Thomas Burns (1796–1871). On the Bishop of Menevia (* 1944) see Thomas Matthew Burns ; for other people, see Tommy Burns .

Thomas Burns

Thomas Burns (born April 10, 1796 in Mossgiel , Ayrshire , Scotland , † January 23, 1871 in Dunedin , New Zealand ) was a pastor, colonialist in Otago and co-founder of Dunedin.

Life

Thomas Burns was the third son of Gilbert Burns (1760-1827), farmer, real estate agent and brother of the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796), and Jean Breckenridge, daughter of a farmer from Kilmarnock , born. Thomas grew up in a large family with eleven children. His father's grandmother, a sister, and a niece filled the house to sixteen people.

Thomas attended Haddington Grammer School. One day his teacher Edward Irving took him to Edinburgh , 22 miles away , to hear one of the famous speeches of the mathematician and theologian Thomas Chalmers . In 1812, when he was just 16 years old, he began to study theology at the University of Edinburgh .

Scotland

1823 Burns was the presbytery in Haddington for pastoral ministry approved and finally on April 13, 1826 in Ballantrae ordained as a pastor. On January 4, 1830, he married Clementina Grant, daughter of the Reverend James Francis Grant, Episcopal pastor in Edinburgh. In the same year he became a pastor in Monkton , Ayrshire . With £ 400 a year, he was one of the highest paid pastors in Scotland's rural churches. During his tenure, the neo-Gothic Monkton and Prestwick Parish Church was built there in 1834 and completed in 1837.

When in May 1843 in the so-called "disruption" under the leadership of Thomas Chalmers 451 the 1203 pastors turned away from the Church of Scotland and transferred to the newly founded Free Church of Scotland , Thomas Burns was one of them and at 47 years one of the oldest and most experienced pastor . He stayed in his ward for 18 months. From 1845 to 1847 he worked in various parishes in Scotland.

During this time Burns became more interested in his church's Otago settlement project and came into contact with George Rennie (1802-1860), sculptor and politician, and William Cargill (1784-1860), bank manager at the time. Together with William Cargill he was chosen by the Free Church of Scotland to lead the settlement project as pastor and pastor.

New Zealand

With 239 settlers on board, he sailed on November 27, 1847 on the Philip Laing towards New Zealand. Cargill started with the John Wickliffe on November 24th . Burns reached Port Chalmers unharmed with all the emigrants on April 15, 1848 and founded the New Edinburgh settlement with Cargill, renamed Dunedin a short time later.

Thomas Burns was a restless "worker" for the next five years. He used his agricultural skills, kept detailed weather records, assessed the quality of the timber and soil conditions, and worked very closely with Cargill to address the social, economic and political challenges of the settlement project. He never forgot his pastoral work. After receiving support from two other pastors in 1854, he set about founding the Presbyterian Church of Otago , which was then constituted in June 1854 and of which he was the undisputed head until his death.

Like Cargill, on whom Burns was greatly influenced, Burns was devoid of humor, patriarchal, stiff and dry in his manner and sometimes rigid in his actions. So he supported Cargill to put an end to the first free and too critical newspaper Otago News . Even so, he was more of a Democrat than Cargill was. Burns was an advocate for education. He helped found the Otago Boys 'High School (1863) and the Otago Girls' High School (1870) and was the first Chancellor of the University of Otago .

In 1861 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in theology from the University of Edinburgh . Burns would never see the completion of his new church, the First Church of Otago , built by Robert Lawson . He died unexpectedly on January 23, 1871, at his home on London Street in Dunedin.

literature

• Alexander Hare McLintock : Burns, Thomas . In: Alexander Hare McLintock (Ed.): An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand . Wellington 1966 ( online [accessed December 15, 2015]).
• Tom Brooking : And Captain Of Their Souls, Cargill & The Otago Colonists . Otago Heritage Books , Dunedin 1984 (English).
• Burns, Thomas . In: New Zealand Encyclopedia . 5th edition. David Bateman Ltd , Auckland 2000, ISBN 0-908610-21-1 (English).

Web links

• Tom Brooking : Burns, Thomas . In: Dictionary of New Zealand Biography . Ministry for Culture & Heritage , September 1, 2010, accessed August 19, 2012 . 
• Gilbert Burns and Grant's Braes . Haddington Community Council, archived from the original onNovember 4, 2007; Retrieved January 11, 2016(English, father and family).