James Brown Armour was born at Lisboy, near the town of Ballymoney, on 20 January 1841. In 1869 Armour was appointed minister at Second Ballymoney (known as Trinity) Presbyterian Church, where he served until his retirement in 1925.

James Brown Armour (1841–1928), usually known as J. B. Armour, was an Irish Presbyterian minister who sought to rally Protestant opinion in the north of Ireland in support of tenant right and against landlordism, and, in his later years, in favour of Irish Home Rule and against threatened unionist resistance to an Irish national parliament.