Olive Copp: A Woman Who Dared

What women who are called to ministry should or should not be doing is an ongoing debate. The "rules" are usually decided by men who, for whatever reasons, reinterpret Scripture and defy good sense. However, that discussion is not for this particular post—that comes later! History, (often as prejudiced as those who record it) still reminds us that women have often broken the barriers imposed on them to carry out the call of God, sometimes at great personal cost. Olive Copp was one of those.

 

From the luxury of an estate called West Lawn in Hamilton to the rough and rude logging and mining camps of Northeastern Ontario and Northwestern Quebec during the 1920s, is quite the leap. For a single woman it would have been deemed by most to be, at the very least, imprudent, and at the worst, scandalous.

 

Olive Copp was the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer who immigrated to Canada from England and established Empire Foundry in 1857. The family, of which Olive was the youngest, frequently travelled back and forth to England, feeling as much at home there as in Ontario.

 

Olive attended Moulton College, which was a private girls' school in Toronto, and part of McMaster University. She was one of five girls who, along with two of the teachers at the college, met daily to pray by name for the salvation of the other girls at the school.

 

She attended a Baptist church in Hamilton. In that same church, a young man by the name of Ian Cruickshank had sensed the call of God to take the gospel to Timmins. Back then it was a gold mining community of about 10,000 made up of shacks without any comforts or conveniences and completely without a witness of any kind. Cruickshank regularly travelled to the town on the train from Toronto. In 1919, during the Spanish flu pandemic, he contracted pneumonia and died alone. 

 

Mrs. Charles Holman, of The Women's Missionary Society of Regular Baptists of Canada, moved by the young missionary’s mission and untimely death, recalled Olive saying: "I must take Ian Cruickshank's place."

 

Off to Timmins she went. She lived at her own expense, and though she had the means to do otherwise she determined to live as Ian had lived. Mrs. Holman wrote: "…she…lived in a poor room over a shack-like store with a tiny stove not adequate to the 40 below zero winters, living as frugally as possible, though possessed of means, duplicating as it were, the life of Ian Cruickshank's privations. And so throughout her stay in the north at Timmins, Widdifield (North Bay), New Liskeard, Cobalt, Milberta(Temiskaming Shores area), and later Noranda and Rouyn, she laboured individually at her own expense in the same frugal way to give the Gospel. Up and down to every small hamlet where a train could be flagged to stop, she went individually visiting every shack along the railroad, and seeking to build churches in the towns now well known but then only beginning."[1]

 

This ministry to which Olive was called was not only challenging but, not surprisingly, lonely, remarked one of her friends from school days at Moulton.[2]

 

She began talking about going to Rouyn and Noranda. At the time no respectable woman would go to Rouyn. She would later buy a home in Noranda. Mrs. Holman recalls that the "Wellington boys" (Frank and Wilfred) lived on the property in a shack and remarks, "a succession of young men earned their spurs through her advance efforts and are today honoured ministers in our churches…Rev. Morley R.  Hall was pastor in Timmins at that time."

 

When Mr. Hall came to Timmins, the church had already been built but the baptistry wasn’t finished. Olive came to him with the news that a lady had come to faith. She felt that the baptistry needed to be completed immediately and offered to pay for it herself to speed the process along.

 

Often Olive would come across shacks along the railroad line that were occupied by prostitutes. She entered each one and shared the Gospel with every one of the women she encountered, pleading with them to accept the hope that Christ offered. 

 

When she left the northland, Olive sold her home in Noranda, so that it could become a school for the children of French converts, who were neither comfortable nor welcome in the Catholic schools in the area. The property later would become the site of the Noranda Baptist Church, pastored by Rev. Murray Heron.

 

In her later years, she looked after an ailing sister in Jamaica. She then settled in Hamilton where she was a member of West Side Baptist Church. She moved to Toronto where, "…she was a blessing to many, and to the very last, doing all she could for those whom she honoured in the Lord." Olive Copp died in Toronto in August 1955.

 

At her memorial service, Rev. Hall remarked that few young ministers would ever think of living and working under the humble and challenging conditions that Olive Copp lived by choice. She spent nothing on herself but used all she had for God. 

 

The tributes received after her passing spoke volumes.

 

“I met her in Kirkland Lake,” wrote W. S. Whitcombe, one of the Fellowship’s most well-known pastors and leaders, “and saw the fruits of her faithful seed sowing, and of her vision throughout the entire North country. A consecrated woman of this sort was God’s gift to His people, and her example has proved to be an inspiration to many others.”[3]

 

Leander Roblin, another of the Fellowship’s notables, was one of those young men who benefitted from Copp’s presence and ministry in the North. He wrote: “How I do thank God for Miss Copp and her faithfulness to the Lord. I will never forget my student days at Kirkland Lake when Miss Copp resided in the same place doing missionary work in connection with the new Baptist Church the Home Mission Committee had begun there. For a woman of refinement and considerable means, to go to the rugged north country, live in humble rooms such as she did, in order to prosper the Lord’s work, is missionary work of the highest order. How often do I remember her kindly, gracious and Scriptural counsel as a youthful pastor. It is such women as Miss Copp who enrich the whole life of our churches.”[4]

 

The name of Olive Copp is remembered, and honoured, by very few today. That is the way she would have wanted it. But surely it is honoured in heaven by the One she so faithfully and humbly served.

 

 

 

 

---

[1] The Fellowship Baptist, (Toronto, Ontario, The Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada, Ed. J. R. Armstrong, Vol II, No. 11, October 1955) p 7

 

[2] The Regular Baptist Call, (The Women’s Missionary Society of Regular Baptist of Canada, Ed. Mrs. Charles J. Holman, Oshawa, Vol. 29, No. 9, September 1955) p. 5

[3] ibid

[4] The Regular Baptist Call, (The Women’s Missionary Society of Regular Baptists of Canada, Ed. Mrs. Charles J. Holman, Oshawa, Vol. 29, No. 10 October 1955), p 2