Short Bio of Elder William Quint

Elder William Quint was a long-serving Old School / Primitive Baptist minister in Maine, best known as pastor of the North Berwick Church and a kind of spiritual anchor for that region in the mid-19th century. He was born on 3 January 1813 and died on 17 January 1892; his grave is in the Quint-Chick Cemetery at North Berwick, York County, Maine. (Ancestry) Primitive Baptist family tradition notes that he was invited to supply the pulpit of the North Berwick Church in March 1850 and formally took the pastoral charge in October 1851, a relationship he held until his death, so roughly forty years of continuous care for that congregation. (PBLib)

Quint shows up repeatedly as a kind of hub in the Old School Baptist network. The Biographical History of Primitive or Old School Baptist Ministers notes that he was “pastor of the church at North Berwick, Maine, for more than forty years,” and also that his sister Mary married Elder William J. Purington, placing him right in the middle of the Purington/Chick line that later dominates Hopewell and the Signs of the Times editorship. (Internet Archive) Elder F. A. Chick recalls hearing his very first gospel sermon from Quint at North Berwick from John 3:3 (“Except a man be born again…”), and being baptized there by Quint – which means Quint was directly involved in forming one of the most important later Old School editors. (Internet Archive)

Locally, he’s also tied to the Oak Woods meeting-house story in North Berwick. A genealogical history of Deacon Samuel Staples recounts how the Baptist work in the Oak Woods area coalesced into a church first under Elder Nathaniel Lord, and then in 1851, “a new pastor, Elder William Quint, was elected to lead the church,” with Staples donating land for a new meeting house in 1852. (Peter Staple Heritage Group (PSHG)) So you’ve got Quint simultaneously as: long-term pastor at North Berwick, leader in the Oak Woods congregation, and a key node linking Maine Primitive Baptists with the Maryland–New Jersey–Signs of the Times line through family and ordination connections.

In terms of theology, everything we know by association points to classic Old School, anti-mission views: he’s treated in the biographical literature and PB family histories as a solid, predestinarian Primitive Baptist whose ministry predates and then overlaps the mature absoluter stream (Purington, Chick, Beebe, etc.). The paper trail you already work with (Purington, Chick, Keene, Signs editors) basically treats “Elder William Quint of North Berwick” as one of the steady, doctrinally safe men in the line that shaped Mid-Atlantic and New England Old School Baptist identity.