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Description area
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History
Reverend Peter De LaRoche (ca.1752-1795) was a French protestant, educated in Geneva and ordained by the Bishop of London in 1771. He came to Lunenburg as a Society for the Propagation of the Gospel missionary and became the rector of St. John's Church in 1771, at which time he reported that his congregation consisted primarily of English-speaking Germans. In 1773, he founded a school for the French at Lunenburg. He himself studied German, and by 1775 he was able to officiate in three languages.
While in Lunenburg he published several sermons and a commentary on the four gospels, which he had printed at his own expense, to be given away to his congregation. He was married ca. 1772 to a woman named Anna (ca.1752-1772), with whom he had three children, including Francklin Bulkley Gould who was baptized on May 27, 1773. The baptism entry indicates that Francklin was the first child in the province innoculated for smallpox.
De LaRoche left Lunenburg ca. 1786 and moved first to Manchester, Nova Scotia and then to Guysborough in 1787, where he passed away in 1795 at age sixty-three.