CHALMERS, Peter: 1831 - 1894
CHALMERS, Thomas: 1833 - 1866
Peter and Thomas Chalmers were the third- and fourth-born sons of Peter Chalmers senior and Margaret Chalmers. They were younger brothers of James Chalmers (Tile #18) and William Chalmers (Tile #19). Their two sisters, Margaret Chalmers Drury and Eliza Chalmers Hart, are commemorated on Tile #20.
Peter Chalmers
Peter Chalmers junior, born in Ireland in 1831, was the third-born son of Peter Chalmers senior, the original 1848 Adolphustown settler and family patriarch. As was the case with his parents and brothers, Peter became an honoured and faithful member of the Anglican Church in Adolphustown and was a strong supporter of the project when the new church of St. Alban’s was being built.
Peter Chalmers died February 6, 1894. His obituary in the 1894 Napanee newspaper tells us that
“...the announcement of his death was received with profound regret throughout a large section of the surrounding country, for no man had been better loved and more highly esteemed than he. . . . In the year 1868 he married Jane Russell, daughter of Thomas Russell, Esq. of North Fredericksburgh and settled on a picturesque spot at the head of Carnahan Bay in Adolphustown(1) which has been his home ever since and where he brought up his family of seven children, six of whom, one son and five daughters, survived to mourn with their stricken mother, the irreparable loss.”(2)
Thomas Chalmers
Thomas Chalmers, who was born in Ireland in 1833, was unmarried. He died in Adolphustown in 1866 at the age of thirty-three. He had predeceased his brother Peter but was posthumously included on this same tile.
Within two years of Peter’s death in 1894, the last two remaining Chalmers brothers also died – Capt. James Chalmers in 1895, William Chalmers in 1896. Many Chalmers' descendants remained in the area.
1. Concession 2, Lot 23, Patron’s Directory of Adolphustown, Illustrated Historical Atlas of Frontenac, Lennox and Addington Counties (Toronto: J.H. Meacham & Co., 1878).
2. “Obituary of Peter Chalmers,” cited in In the Beginning: A history of St. Alban’s (St. Alban’s New Horizons Committee, 1984), pp. 39-40.