Captain Nathan Albert Lockhart (Nathan1) b. May 13, 1819, m. in 1848, Elizabeth Ann Bezanson, of noble Huguenot ancestry. Of grandfather Bezanson, Rev. A. J. Lockhart says: "He was a Baptist lay preacher, and was an intelligent reader and student of divinity. He was a man of strong sense and excellent judgment and ruled and guided his family wisely and well. He was a familiar conversationist and had a genius for friendship, his attachment sometimes being of a romantic kind. He was twice married; first to a woman named Hemmeon, by whom he had several children, and, after her death to Miss Anderson, who was my mother’s mother. My mother had relatives in the Gaspereau Valley. John Anderson, her uncle, settled there and reared a family who settled round him. I used to visit them in cherry time or apple time. Uncle John lived in a low-roofed, old-fashioned farm house, with orchard and garden, and long rows of currant bushes and trees at the back of the house, full, in the season, of luscious red cherries, and tall pear trees in front, of which the little sweet pears were to my taste admirable."
"My mother," says Mr. Lockhart, "was born at Chester, Oct. 20, 1819, and when about 28 was married to my father. She survived her husband several years, and died in her 81st year, April 3, 1900, in the home of her youngest daughter, Mrs. Regina Fogg, of Hyde Park, Mass. My mother had some of the mental characteristics of her father—his sprightliness, his strong sense, his friendliness, his scorn of meanness. She was like him in his activity in a green old age, and in possession of her faculties. She could ride on horseback when a young woman, and was always a good walker. She never seemed to grow old, and was always a person of dignity and of an attractive presence. In physique, the second son, my brother Nathan (Nathan Joseph Lockhart), was the flower of the family. When I last saw him he was in the full bloom of manhood. The sea claimed him, and some untoward fate was his, we know not what. He had just married and set up a home. His bride was Nancy Whitman, of Aylesford, N. S., who six months after her marriage faced the dreadful intelligence that her husband had perished at sea. My mother never wholly recovered from that blow. A son was born to him who he never saw—a second Nathan, who is now a lawyer in the Canadian West. His mother was married again to a Baptist minister, and had a family of sons and daughters.
"My parents’ third child, Palemon, died in infancy, of a brain fever. Next came my brother, the Rev. Burton Wellesley Lockhart, D. D., pastor of the Franklin Street Congregationalist Church at Manchester, N. H. He m. at Suffield, Conn., Frances M. Upson. In 1894 he became pastor at the church to which he now ministers." A newspaper article on Rev. Burton Wellesley Lockhart, written by the Rev. Dr. Trask, says:
"Perhaps no preacher in the little city to the north of us has so many strangers in his congregation, drawn by his pulpit power. It is a rare Sunday when there are not some Springfield people in the audience. There are also a number who come down regularly from the alls, while visitors from the street, Willimansett and West Springfield, are not infrequent. Dr. Lockhart is now in the full prime of life, and his studies in philosophy and general literature, no less than religion, combine to make him not only a pleasing conversationalist, but an instructive and inspiring preacher. . . . His parishioners in all of the pastorates he has filled have loved him intensely. His gentleness of spirit, united with rare intellectual powers, captivates his audience. He has humanity, and as the phrenologists would say, in a large degree, and his people feel it. He has a keen, searching mind, and his people know it, so he both beloved and admired. Literature is his pastime, preaching his passion. He loves philosophy, but truth he adores. A finely shaped and good sized head, features clear and well cut, the eyes large and dark, and suffused with a mellow and attractive light, are the elements of Dr. Lockhart’s physical appearance, which are the most impressive and commanding. He was installed as pastor of the Franklin Street Congregationalist Church, Manchester, January 24, 1894. He has written considerable prose and verse."
The eldest daughter of Capt. Nathan Albert and Elizabeth Ann (Bezanson) Lockhart is Alice Alberta, Mrs. John Bentley of Halifax, N. S. Another daughter is Regina Elizabeth, m. to Charles Fogg, of Cambridge, Mass., whose mother was a Lockhart. The youngest sonof Capt. Nathan Albert is Albert David, a pharmacist in Waterbury, Conn., who has also a place of business at Round Hill, Annapolis county, N. S.
The eldest son of Capt. Nathan Albert and Elizabeth Ann (Bezanson) is Rev. Arthur John Lockhart, whose familiar nom de plume is "Pastor Felix." Mr. Lockhart, who has an important mention in an earlier part of this book, was b. at Lockhartville, King’s County, May 5, 1850. He says of himself:
"My education was wholly in the district school, which was kept by a farming neighbor, Mr. William Redden, in a little yellow schoolhouse, which was his property, and stood on once corner of his lot,—a landmark now gone. This was supplemented by books and private studies. I had an early instinct for literature, and was in love from my school days with geography, history, biography and poetry. The poems of Burns, of Goldsmith, Fray and Thomson fell into my hands while yet a child, and found there food for mental growth and matter of deep appreciation. To these were soon added the poems of Byron and some classical tales such as "Rasselas" and the "Vicar of Wakefield," and the dramas of Shakespeare.
"Among the books in my father’s house—few enough—were some bound copies of Harper’s Magazine. These volumes contained the Seasons of Thomson, with wood-cut illustrations. With these poems I then became familiar—especially the "Spring" and "Summer," and to them, in spite of judgment to the contrary, I have ever been partial. Then came Beattie’s poem and the Odes and Eclogues of Collins. Coleridge, Scott, Shelley and Tennyson came later, and found their welcome, but my taste was formed upon the earlier masters. Cowper and Burns and Wordsworth have ever been favorites of mine.
"Dr. Brown (Edward L. Brown, of Wolfville) was in my youth a literary and poetical mentor. He brought me to an acquaintance with Butler and gave me a copy of Hudibras.
"When about seventeen years of age I went to Wolfville, N. S., and lived in the home and worked in the office of Mr. Major Theakston, who published the Wolfville Acadian. I was with him for three years, and we have ever been friends. He visited me this month (June, 1909) and was in my house nearly two weeks. For over 38 years he has been a city missionary in the city of Halifax, residing at 111 Agricola street. He is the pastor of the North End Mission, which he has built up and made an agency of great good in the Acadian metropolis.
"Upon the close of my life at Wolfville, I went to Cambridge, Mass., where I lived in the home of my father’s uncle, David Lockhart, and worked at the University press, during one year. There I had the opportunity of seeing from time to time, such living lights of literature as Longfellow, Lowell, and others of that time. I worked on Every Saturday, an illustrated paper of which Thomas Bailey Aldrich was editor. That natty, quick stepping little man came each week to the office and was often seen walking down the composing room, Hudson, the Shakespearian scholar, use often to come there.
"I began to rhyme early, and in fact did so on my slate at school when I should have ciphered. I loved the figures of speech, and hated numerals. They convey little to my mind even at this day. As cripple and often invalid, confined to eh house in the winter, I had as a child loved to rove in the summer, and the Valley of Gaspereau, with its dykes, was one of my favorite grounds of recreation. I spent weeks with the Trenholms and Andersons in that dear valley. Such verses as ‘Acadie,’ ‘The Alien’s Message,’ ‘Gaspereau,’ etc., testify to that love.
"W. G. Macfarlane, writing in the Dominion Illustrated has said ‘The last named poem (Gaspereau) is the offspring as much of the scene it describe as of the poet who wrote it. Any one who has been privileged to see the Gaspereau Valley, one of the prettiest pictures of quiet, graceful, rural beauties imaginable, will see at once that poem is full of the inspiration of that place. Imagine yourself on a point of vantage, the bend of a road, crossing a span of South Mountain to Gaspereau village. You are on a summit of a about 10 miles (?) and a mile of breath. Through its center flows the narrow Gaspereau stream, at time foaming over rocks, and again rushing along in an unrippled rapid, while the luxuriant willows that fringe the banks cast their perfect reflection on the water. On its edge is a small mill, looking in the distance like a toy house, while it is crossed by a rustic bridge. Surrounding the bridge is a little hamlet with a pretty church, and along the side of the valet are prosperous, well kept farms, with smiling orchards and grain fields, and dotted with patches of spruce and fir. The valley seems shut in the hills at both ends, and at its lowest extremity the stream broadens into what appears to be a lake—a fancy that renders the picture more romantic. In reality, though, it is the estuary of the stream that empties into the Basin of Minas at Grand Pré flats, and just beyond the reach of vision is where, over a century since, the English vessels were moored when the memorable expulsion took place.’
"I entered on the religious life definitely, in 1868, under the pastorate of Rev. Charles Bruce Pibblado. In the autumn of 1871, I went to St. Andrews, N. B., to assist him in his pastorate there, and used to travel during the winder the country parts of that parish, Bocabec, Dydequash, and Maguadavic or St. George. In the early summer of 1872 I entered the Methodist Episcopal Conference of Eastern Maine, at its session at Orono, under the presidency of Bishop Andrews. I was taken on trial, and stationed at the English village, Pembroke Iron Works, where I boarded with Mr. Isaac Mincher, and afterwards with a family named Dean. I ministered to people who came from the Midland of England, who worked in the iron foundry as puddlers and mail cutters. The iron workers are now gone, and the English village broken up.
"The next year I was married to Miss Adelaide Beckerton, daughter of James Beckerton, shipwright and tradesman of St. Andrews, N. B., who was four years my senior. She is, if the words of Wordsworht may be used by me without seeming extravagant,
‘A perfect woman, nobly planned,’
who has been to me the source of my choicest earthly blessing, social and domestic. We were married at her father’s house, on the 12th of May, 1873. We went immediately to Portland, and after a few days in the home of Dr. Pitbaldo, then pastor at Congress Street M. E. Church, we went on to our Annual Conference at Damariscotta, where I was reappointed to Pembroke Iron Works. We set up our home in a part of the John Dean house, with upper chambers overlooking the little Pennamaguan river, on which I went with punt for pickerel or lilies."
Mr. Lockhart remained at Pembroke Iron Works two years, and then went to Lubec, on the sea coast (which he says has always seemed his "natural habitat"), where he "ranged the borders of the sea and its islands, from Eastport to Quoddy Light." He has since held pastorates at Jacksonville (East Machias), Pembroke, Orrington, to which he came in the springof 1886, and where he lived for three years in "a little white parsonage, under the shelter of a large church with a tell-tale spire and a bell, that overlooked the river;" East Corinth, Cherryfield, and Milbridge, Hampden, Pemaquid and New Harbor, East Boothbay, and Winterport, all in Maine.
From "Men of Progress," a Boston publication of 1896, we learn that William Lawson Lockhart, son of David and Lucy (McNutt) Lockhart, a successful Boston business man, was b. in Horton, July 20, 1829, and began business in East Cambridge, Mass., in 1856. In 1857 he m. Lucy O. Smith of Kennebunk, Me. The business he founded is now carried on by his sons at Haymarket Square, Boston.