Robert Cunningham

Robert Cunningham (1837–1905) was a British-Canadian lay missionary turned entrepreneur who founded the town of Port Essington, British Columbia. He was born January 1, 1837, in Dungannon, Ireland (one source, Large, says "Tullyvally, Ireland"), to a Protestant (Anglican) family. In 1862, at the age of twenty-five, he sailed to Canada with the Anglican Church Missionary Society to work as a lay assistant to the Anglican lay missionary William Duncan at the Tsimshian community of Metlakatla, B.C. Missionary Work Shortly after his arrival at Metlakatla Robert Cunningham was assigned to assist the missionary R. Arthur Doolan, himself newly arrived from England, in founding a new mission among the Nisga'a. Together with a Tsimshian interpreter named Robert Dundas they opened a mission among the villages on the lower Nass River in July 1864. When it soon came to light that Cunningham had fathered a child with a young Tsimshian student of Duncan's named Elizabeth Ryan Doolan married the couple and Cunningham's formal relationship with the Church Missionary Society was terminated.