Reverend John Gardner & Catherine GardnerPrint Page

The plaque commemorates Reverend John Gardner and Catherine Gardner.

John Gardner (1809 - 1899) was a Scots-born Presbyterian minister in Adelaide, South Australia,, the first incumbent of Chalmers Free Church of Scotland, now Scots Church, North Terrace, Adelaide. He later served at Launceston, Tasmania and Queenscliff, Victoria.

He arrived in Adelaide from England in March 1850 and immediately he and the group set about purchasing the land on the corner of North Terrace and Pulteney Street, and building a church there.  The foundation stone for the new church was laid on the 8th of September 1850, six months after his arrival. Services were held in various buildings until the new church, called Chalmers Church, was opened in July 1851.

Membership expanded rapidly, often at the expense of the two older Presbyterian churches. In 1854 Gardner formed the Free Church Presbytery. Negotiations in 1860 for reunion of the three churches proved abortive but in May 1865 the Presbyterian Church of South Australia was formed and Gardner was elected moderator of its new presbytery. Prominent in the colony's social and religious affairs, he served on committees of the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Aborigines Friends Association, the Bush Mission, the Benevolent and Strangers Friend Society and the Female Refuge. His lectures in 1853 at the opening of the Young Men's Christian Association, 'The Literary Merits of the Bible' and 'Missions: the Great Enterprise of the Christian Church', were later printed. He visited regularly at the Adelaide Hospital and in politics was active in educational matters and in opposing the bill to legalize marriage with a deceased wife's sister.

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