OCCUPATION: farmer, dentist, reformer

Married to Sarah Ann Fawcett (Jan.14,1845-
Oct. 28, 1896) on Dec.18,1861.

Children:
(1) Amy Lavina (Jan.16,1863-Nov.9,1916)
married Rev. David Anderson Moir (1853-
July 15,1947) on Jan.16,1883. Both
buried in the Adams plot.

(2) John Franklin (Sept.23,1864-July 20,1933)
was first married to Edith Bishop Young
(Oct.22,1870-May 18,1891).
On Mar.22,1894 he married Ada Elizabeth
Robertson Hoggan.
Occupation: dentist in Toronto

(3) Ezra Herbert (Sept.19,1866-June 23,1953)
Occupation: dentist/doctor; also buried
in the Adams plot.

(4) Eleanor Jane (July 1,1868-Oct.10,1918)
a teacher, was unmarried. Also buried
in the Adams plot.

(5) Matilda Maria (Sept.1,1870- ) married
George S. Martin, dentist, on May 23,1894.
They lived in Port Colborne, ON.

(6) Sarah Electa (Sept.10,1872- ) married
Arthur Murdoc Matthews (1870-1907).

(7) William Fawcett (Nov.27,1874-
July 24,1963) married Ethel Anna Paxton
on June 17,1902 in Toronto.
Occupation: dentist

(8) Louise Adeline (Feb.12,1882-July 28,1967)
married Walter Smith (d. Feb.1,1917). Her
second husband was a Mr. Harvey. Louise
and Walter buried in the Adams plot.

(9) George Arthur M. (Feb.24,1884- )
married Mary M. Lean on Sept.24,1908.
Occupation: dentist


FROM A DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY
As a youth John Adams farmed on the family homestead near Drayton, Ontario. He drifted away in 1869 and the following year at the age of 31, he moved to Toronto with his wife and children to study dentistry under his half-brother, William Case Adams. His diary of 1871-73, kept during his indentureship, is a revealing record of his evangelical bent and dialogue with God, his visits to the sick and the poor, and his unswerving faith that Providence would send work his way (usually fillings) to pay for the next day's food and fuel. In 1872 he began performing free "dental hospital work" among children of poor families. After receiving his LDS from the Royal College of Dental Surgeons of Ontario in 1874, he opened his own practice, which he moved in the 1880s to the corner of Elm and Yonge streets in the core of the city.
Adam's Methodist and charitable convictions infused his denistry to an extent that many deemed fanatical. He saw the dental care of children as a divine mission and began acting aggressively on this belief in the 1890s. He was appalled by the wretched condition of children's teeth, the prevalence of related disease and deformity, and the degree of parental misunderstanding of dental development and oral hygiene. Examinations made by Adams and his son, Dr. Ezra Herbert Adams, at Victoria Street School, 1893-94, revealed serious neglect in a stunning 98 per cent of the students.
At the time when the problem was a matter of no professional concern, Adam's efforts to help launch a dental infirmary for the poor in 1893 and his paper to the Ontario Dental Society in 1895 on the care of children's teeth, had little impact. Nonetheless, with the support of the Toronto Dental Society and the Toronto Trades and Labor Council, he travelled widely the following year to deliver his message, addressing such bodies as the Provincial Board of Health, the National Council of Women of Canada, its Local Council in Hamilton and the Michigan State Dental Association.
In a publication, he wrote that to get needy children to his free clinic, which was next to his office, he had hired people to "hunt" them up. In 1896 he moved to expand his work by buying the Temperance Coffee House Association building on Elm at Terauley Street. The following year he opened a Christ's Mission Dental Hospital there, a free clinic combined with a mission hall, a coffee room and an employment bureau. In April 1899 the RCDS agreed to his request that dental students be allowed to continue to "operate gratuitously in charitable institutions under the direction of a member." A month later, unable to pay back-taxes of $200, Adams was forced to close the mission hospital. City council refused an exemption on the grounds of charitable function.
Undaunted - Adams styled himself a "dental missionary" - he rechanneled his energy, lobbying municipal health and school officials for province-wide dental inspection and treatment. His attacks on physicians who mishandled tooth-related illness and his sweeping claims, as in his statement in 1901 to Premier George Wm. Ross that "there are not less than one million permanent teeth going to destruction in the mouths of the school children of Ontario," drew opposition as well as support. Undoubtedly Adams was pleased with the work of George K. Thompson and other dentists in Nova Scotia, where school inspections were instituted in 1908, the earliest in Canada. The Toronto Board of Education led the way in 1911 when it initiated inspections; two years later, in the spirit of Adam's hospital, the city's health department opened a dental clinic for the poor, the first free clinic in Canada.
Adam's public involvement was not limited to preventive dentistry. He promoted window gardening as an element of civic pride. A Reformer in politics, he belonged to the Sons of Temperance, the Good Templars, the Ancient Order of United Workmen and the Select Knights of Canada, and was a steward and trustee of St. Paul's Methodist Church in the Yorkville area of Toronto, where he had lived since the 1870s. His large family shared his religious and professional devotions. All of his sons followed him into dentistry; son William F., who also earned degrees in medicine and divinity, spent many years in China as a medical missionary.
Adams retired in 1912 and died ten years later. A visionary philanthropist, he had sparked an important movement. By the end of the 1920s most of the large municipalities across Canada had some form of dental inspection for children. Few dentists leave such a legacy.