Item 0032 - Letter, 27 November 1882

Rev. Calvin Elijah Amaron was born on September 4, 1852, in Ramsay, St. Felix de Valois, Quebec.

He was a Presbyterian minister, educator, newspaper editor, and author. He received his early education at the Académie de Berthier and the Institut de Pointe-aux-Trembles. He graduated from McGill University (B.A., 1877; M.A., 1880) and the Presbyterian College (B.D., 1884). In 1879, he was ordained to the ministry of the Presbyterian Church of Canada in Trois-Rivières. In 1882, he accepted a call to the French Protestant Church in Lowell, Mass., to continue the work of evangelizing French Canadians who migrated south to work in the factories of New England. In 1885, Amaron founded the French Protestant College at Lowell with the help of ministers from the Massachusetts Home Missionary Society and became president of the college. In 1886, ministers working with the missionary society formed the French Publishing Society and in 1887, they launched a weekly newspaper Le Semeur franco-américain and later Le Citoyen franco-américain. After returning to Montreal in 1895, Amaron founded the Dominion Publishing Company, of which he became a manager. He purchased the L'Aurore newspaper and established it as the organ of French Protestantism in America. He was called to the pulpit of St. John’s French Presbyterian Church in Montreal (1896-1906). He became minister of Gardenville Ave. Presbyterian Church in Longueuil in 1906, the year, he was awarded an honorary D.D. degree by the French Protestant College. From 1909 to 1911 he oversaw the Presbyterian church at Joliette, and the last years of his active ministry, 1911 to 1916, were spent at the Église Presbytérienne Française in Quebec City.

In 1881, he married Agnes McDougall (1860–1893), and in 1895, he remarried Margaret Lorne Lynch (1872–1948). He died on March 15, 1917, in Verdun, Quebec.