Second Immigrant Generation
Descendents of Andrew Grey (ca 1785-94 – after 1861)
and 1. Mary Watson (unknown– aboard D'arcy summer, 1836)
and 2. Sarah Burgess ( ca 1810 – 11 Nov 1896)
First immigrant Generation
INTRODUCTION
The 1830s and 1840s were the heyday of the great land companies throughout much of British North America. The Canada Company in Upper Canada (Ontario), was founded in 1824 (and chartered 1826), the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia Land Company in New Brunswick in 1831 (chartered 1834), and the British American Land Company in the Eastern Townships of Lower Canada (Quebec) in 1832 (chartered 1834). (1) The land company was, from a governmental perspective, an early form of privatization, or more accurately to the period, a delegation of responsibility for land settlement (like the early leader and associates system, or the district land boards system in Upper Canada).
All these companies purchased large tracts of land at comparative bargain prices, promising to develop the settlement infrastructure of roads, mills, and towns, and intending to derive profits for their prominent English shareholders by reselling the lands to settlers. The attraction for the colonial governments was that the companies provided a large infusion of capital relatively quickly to executives and administrations that were locked in combat with their elected assemblies over the control of other forms of colonial revenue.
Map no. 1 New Brunswick & Nova Scotia Land Company Tract, 1834. The Company's Stanley settlement was immediately north of the pre-existing Welsh settlement at Cardigan.
Source : Private collection; see CIHM N.21463
The New Brunswick Company, as it quickly became known, was organized in 1831 and incorporated in 1834. It purchased a tract of 589,000 acres in York County north of Fredericton at 2s 3d per acre. The tract comprised all the lands in the county north of the Saint John and west of the Nashwaak, and west also of the portage road to the South West Miramichi (now Highway 8), apart from lands already ceded.
The promoters were inspired by what they saw as the "success of the Canada Company, and the extraordinary increase of emigration to America during the last five years." The Canada Company had sold 184,000 acres of land in Upper Canada in three years,(2) but the New Brunswick Company's directors did not take into account that most of this was former Crown reserves scattered, every seventh lot, through the old settlements. The Canada Company was not nearly as successful in drawing settlers to its million-acre Huron Tract, well beyond the current frontier of settlement, until natural inward expansion reached the frontiers of their holding at the end of the 1830s (3). The Huron Tract included much prime quality land, however, and it became attractive as the frontier of settlement pushed inexorably northward. The BALC in Lower Canada similarly reaped profits from selling reserve lots in the older townships, but was unable to counter the disadvantageous land quality and isolation of its rugged St Francis Tract, which in the end it exploited as timberland(4).
Chart of the Atlantic exhibiting the relative distances between the British North American colonies and the United Kingdom - notably the New Brunswick Land Company and Canada Company tracts. Source : CIHM N.63916
The New Brunswick Company did not enjoy the advantage of lands scattered through the older settlements, and much of the most accessible land adjoining its territory, along the major rivers, had already been granted away. Their York County purchase was to suffer similar disadvantages to the Huron and St Francis blocks from its comparative isolation and the Company's slowness to improve the roads. The Company made a great deal of the fact that New Brunswick was much closer to Great Britain than was the Huron Tract, and published a map that dramatically demonstrated this (5). But by the 1830s New Brunswick was proving a less attractive prospect for English immigrants than Canada, closer or not. Given the inferior quality of much of the soil, the bulk of the York County purchase, too, would eventually be exploited for timber rather than field crops.
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Just as the Canada Company established the towns of Guelph and Goderich, Ontario, and the British American Land Company the town of Sherbrooke, Quebec, so the New Brunswick Company spent £80,000 in the first few years in preparing two townsites 18 miles apart: Stanley, on the Nashwaak 25 miles north of Fredericton, and Campbellton on the Miramichi (now Bloomfield Ridge) (6). Stanley was named for the Colonial Secretary in London, Campbellton for the colonial governor, Sir Archibald Campbell. Company employees surveyed the townsites, built mills and houses, and cut through the roads, but less was accomplished than was promised in Company literature. Of the two, only Stanley achieved a modest level of success as a magnet for settlers.
W.P. Kay, Clearing the Town Plot at Stanley, October 1834, part of a promotional publication released by the Land Company. Source: NA, C-40780
OVERSEAS RECRUITMENT
The problem all three British North American land companies faced was attracting purchasers to their territories. Initially all three engaged in active overseas recruitment, but the BALC and the New Brunswick Company came to depend in the end upon attracting settlers already in the colonies. All three companies in the 1830s recruited in the Old Country through the use of agents, as press advertisements proved insufficient. The New Brunswick Company advertised for both shareholders and settlers in Suffolk newspapers (7) but failed to attract emigrants from East Anglia because George Lake, agent for the Lower Canadian company, and William Cattermole, a Canada Company agent, were successfully working that area. Cattermole, himself a Suffolk emigré, had returned to his native region to recruit immigrants for the Canada Company's lands as early as 1830. In this he proved successful, recruiting several shiploads of Norfolk farm labourers and himself leading a party of self-sufficient agriculturalists from Suffolk and Kent to the company's Guelph settlement. Cattermole lamented that the members of the unaccompanied parties tended to seek work or take up lands, often Crown lands, in the townships west from Hamilton, en route to, but not as far inland as, the Company's Huron Tract (8).
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The NBLC advertised for shareholders and settlers from Suffolk as early as 1832, but failed to secure emigrants there because of competition from agents of other land companies.
Lake, agent for the BALC, recruited in north-central Suffolk and western Norfolk, areas beyond the reach of Cattermole's lecture tours, and chartered ships to take his settlers directly to Port St Francis on the south shore of the St Lawrence. Lake did not lose too many on the long overland trek to the Sherbrooke area, but many of his settlers drifted off to greater opportunities in Upper Canada or the United States when they saw the comparatively poor quality of the soil and the unquestioned isolation of the Company's Eastern Townships lands(9).
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For the Canada Company, a different tactic by the middle 1830s was beginning to prove more effective in drawing immigrants directly to the Huron Tract. The Company appointed existing local settlers as its township agents, rather than members of the colonial elite or expatriate half-pay officers or imperial civil servants, and it relied upon their contacts with their home regions to stimulate chain migration from specific areas of the British Isles. The most well-known example is James Hodgins from County Tipperary, Ireland who became the Company's agent for Biddulph Township (10). Immigrants from Devon likewise were appointed to oversee settlement in Usborne and Stephen Townships just to the north of Biddulph (11). The Company successfully cashed in on chain migrations already under way, as immigration of Protestants from Tipperary into the adjoining non-company township of London had been growing steadily since 1818. This network of internal agents is difficult to document because only the correspondence of the Canada Company's Toronto commissioner with the Court of Directors in London has survived, not the internal correspondence that came to rest in its Toronto office. The practice is, however, evidenced in the press and in later local histories.
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The success of this system depended upon the word of mouth back to Ireland or England being favourable, and the chief advantages here were favourable terms and genuinely good land. The land in Huron County was some of the best in Upper Canada. Neither the Eastern Townships lands of the British American Land Company, nor the tract in York County of the New Brunswick Land Company were so attractively fertile as to counteract the difficulties of access or, more importantly, other discouraging factors. These included obstacles put in place by the colonial governments, and the overwhelming positive publicity overseas about Upper Canada. By contrast, first impressions of Stanley, New Brunswick were often unfavourable, as the Company's settlement road "unfortunately ... [was] made upon a rocky & comparatively barren [tract] of Land, whereas admirable Soil is to be found within a Short distance on either side."(12)
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The New Brunswick Company made four concerted attempts at direct overseas recruitment that I will now outline. The first targeted poor children institutionalized in London, the second farm labourers and tradesmen in the eastern Borders between England and Scotland. The third party was recruited, disastrously, in the Scottish highlands, and the fourth was a second party from the Borders. The first three parties were settled in and around Stanley, with varying degrees of success; the fourth escaped the Company's control and founded Harvey, south of Fredericton.
JUVENILE RECRUITMENT
The New Brunswick Company's first colonization effort, in 1835-6, was one of the earliest exercises in juvenile emigration to what is now Canada. The names of eleven boys brought out by the Company have been preserved by local historians, and they have come down in local memory as the "Blue Boys", with the explanation that they came from the so-called Blue Coat School, or Christ's Hospital in London, a Tudor establishment for disadvantaged children of the respectable classes.(13) A Mrs Malone in the 1930s said that "it was only a few years since that she threw out the little beds in which the Blue Boys slept when they first came to Stanley."(14) This construction of the facts is interesting because the boys did not come from Christ's Hospital, but rather from an asylum at Hackney Wick operated by the Society for the Suppression of Juvenile Vagrancy, a London charity for children from much further down the social ladder. Given that a few of the boys founded prominent New Brunswick families, this reworking of memory was probably an attempt later in life to distance themselves from contemporary "home children" who were commonly vilified as the dregs of English society.(15) The SSJV was later renamed the Children's Friend Society, and the CFS may be said to have inaugurated in 1833 the emigration of the home children who were to become such a feature of assisted emigration to Canada (including the Maritimes) after 1869.(16)
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The CFS sent parties to both New Brunswick and the Canadas, though much of its work - and attendant controversy - centred on the much greater numbers it sent to South Africa. There the end of slavery had been forced on the Boers by the British administration, and some of the Dutch settlers treated the CFS children as "nothing more than English replacements for their foregone slaves". Their arrival coincided with the Afrikaaner rebellion of 1835-6, and complaints from South Africa led to the collapse of the organization.(17)
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The Children's Friend Society shared an overlapping directorship with the New Brunswick Land Company, and it was at their behest that the New Brunswick Company's commissioner in Fredericton, Lieut. E.N. Kendall, was instructed to call a public meeting to gauge public willingness to form a local committee of the CFS.(18) The New Brunswick Courier denounced the idea as a conspiracy to unload on the province "the most depraved and vicious of the human race", urchins more fitted for a convict colony.(19) At the meeting held 9 January 1834 at Fredericton Court House, Kendall countered that "the illegitimate and pauper children ... of the London Parishes" would be brought here "while they are still at an age when it is practicable, by a well considered system of moral discipline, to reform their vagrant habits, and to render them worthy and industrious members of society." In a country with a shortage of labour they would make capital apprentices in trades, or house or store servants. "The Youth sent hither, having no ties of kindred, would naturally look to their employers as to persons standing in relation of Parents to them, and the latter, if for no other motive, would be prompted by their own interests to treat them kindly." Despite the St Andrews Standard joining the Saint John papers in protesting the plan, terming the boys "a moral leprosy on the people of New Brunswick", (20) a committee was duly organized and a bill passed the New Brunswick legislature in March 1834 allowing the importation of pauper apprentices for the next two years.
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As already noted, local historians record the names of eleven boys, but the Company brought out to the province either 39 or 41 boys and 1 girl, of whom in total eighteen have been identified. In 1835 the Company paid £18.10 for the "Passage of four Boys to New Brunswick".(22) They arrived at Miramichi in the spring of that year aboard a ship called the 574.
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We can identify them thanks to a letter from one printed in a pamphlet the CFS published in 1837. Henry Potter (23) wrote from Campbell, 4 November 1835, that after a voyage of six weeks and four days they had landed at Chatham "about ninety miles below this place, and walked up." He reported that Mr Duncan (the Company's agent at Campbell (24)) was going to put him to a shoemaker to learn the trade. He reported that the other boys were one Hawkins, who had run away, Hunter, working as a farm servant, and Thomas, working as a servant to a blacksmith.(25) The CFS reports state that two boys also went to New Brunswick in the Henry Bell in 1835, but no further information is given. They may not have come out under the auspices of the New Brunswick Land Company, as the Company's balance sheet for 1835 notes that they paid expenses only for four.
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Thirty-five boys and a girl were among the 46 passengers for the Company who arrived at Saint John on 2 June 1836 aboard the Hinde (Custard) from London. They were accompanied by J. Charles Forss, formerly agricultural master at the CFS school at Hackney Wick, who was himself becoming a settler at Stanley. Their arrival is comparatively well-documented, but let us allow one of the boys, John Harvey, to tell the story.
Harvey was neither parentless nor an illegitimate child. His mother had placed him in St James's Workhouse after the death of his father. Following her remarriage her new husband, Mr White, offered to take the lad as an apprentice, but she was convinced by the CFS that in New Brunswick he could "follow whatever trade he pleased" and "in every respect be comfortably situated." She wrote to her son several times, but by the spring of 1839 had received only a single letter dated 12 March 1838. In desperation she presented herself before the local police court in Marylebone and had the letter read aloud in hopes that the publicity would stir the Society to action. A reporter was present, and John Harvey's letter was published in The Times :
"... when I arrived at Sergons [Saint John], I sailed up to Fredericton in a Stem bot, and then we cum up to Starley, and then we had to slep in a Barn amongst horses and lay in amongst straw, and then we was put out to the woods in a camp by ourselves, and the meet we got only fit for hogs; and der Mother we was sent out to work, and we Could not walk Because we was all Ragged like a Begger and starved with Cold, and then we last winter was took out farther to the woods, and Mister Foss Had us choping down his trees, and all the boys mostly Left him"(26)
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He left Forss and "went to serve a man that Kep a Tavern, and I hav varey havey work to do, and i am vary Bad sitterwated for close." He complained that all his possessions, including books given him by his mother, were in the hands of Mr Forss and he had been unable to retrieve them. We do not know whether Mrs White ever heard from her son again, but by 1851 Harvey was farming at Lime Kiln near Stanley, married and with three children of his own.
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Forss had reported that "the boys attracted great attention at St John's, (where labour at present is in great demand;)" and that he was in Fredericton awaiting the arrival of Mr Kendall "to arrange about forming committees". Evidently the committee formed at Fredericton in 1834 had lapsed, and a successor may never have been established. John Stephens, the New Brunswick Company's acting agent at Fredericton, forwarded the children immediately on to Stanley to see to their apprenticeships, along with the family of Daniel Brewer, later a farmer on Cross Creek Road, who had come out, fittingly enough, to operate the land company's tavern.
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We do not know what happened to most of the boys after they left Mr Forss. Edwin Foot was placed with Judge G.F. Street just outside Fredericton and he reported that "the[y] are more like my parents than my master and mistress; the hav given me a great deal of clothes; .... we lived not very well coming over, but I live well now.(27) Only three of the boys were still at Stanley in 1851: John Harvey, already noted, John Thomas, married and farming on Cross Creek Road, and Henry Bendell, one of two brothers from Bath, nephews of a milkwoman who had prevailed upon a Captain Thickness to get them into the CFS pauper school in London. Henry Bendell married a daughter of Stanley schoolmaster and surveyor Robert Waugh, and was living with him there. Either Henry or his brother Mark is said to have died in the lumber woods as a young man; indeed Henry died in 1856 leaving a small family.(28) George Linnel, 15 when he came out, was at 30 still a servant, with Benjamin Richards, a Welsh farmer in Douglas. Alfred Judge had returned to England by 1838. Some became successful. John Thomas became renowned as a gardener, and Richard Bellamy became a surveyor, lumberman, and member of the Legislative Council.(29) Though they were not alumni of the Blue Coat School, their humble origins did not prevent some of these boys from achieving positions of success and respectability in the new land.
The Berwick Settlers
While the Canada Company and BALC agents were targeting East Anglia for agricultural immigrants, the NBLC centred its attention upon another region, the eastern Borders between England and Scotland. Emigration from the north of England, especially from Yorkshire and Co. Durham, dated back to the 1770s and had been directed to the Maritimes off and on for fifty years. Northumberland had not been immune from this movement, as Roger Woodhouse has recently demonstrated, but its involvement was not as important as that of Yorkshire. By the 1830s, however, the Yorkshire movement largely had been diverted to opportunities in Upper Canada. Emigration to Prince Edward Island from the western Borders, especially from Dumfriesshire, Scotland, sailing from Dumfries or Annan or from ports in the adjoining English county of Cumberland, was well-established and was having some spillover into New Brunswick. (30) But it is questionable whether the Company was aware of this, and why it chose to target the eastern Borders remains uncertain. Over 1,200 emigrants from the area had embarked for Quebec from Berwick-upon-Tweed in 1831-35, but by the latter year numbers were falling off dramatically, achieving only single digits in 1836 and little better during the two succeeding years. (31) Perhaps declining interest in Canada could provide an opportunity to recruit for another colony. (32)
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The Company's New Brunswick commissioner, E.N. Kendall, a retired naval lieutenant (33), personally visited the counties of Northumberland, England and Haddington and Edinburgh (the Lothians) in Scotland in February 1836. (34) Kendall was accompanied by David Stuart, one of the Company directors, when he visited Ford Castle, Northumberland "for the purpose of engaging Families to settle on the Companys Lands". They did not advertise in the newspapers, but circulated printed prospectuses and leaflets. The Company promised lots of 100 acres with 5 acres cleared and a log house ready for the emigrants' reception, and a lease for 50 years at a rent of 1s. per acre, with an option to purchase the freehold at 20 years purchase. They also promised employment on road works, provisions at moderate prices, and medical assistance, and offered to advance as a loan the cost of passage. (35) It does not appear that any Scots from Haddington or Edinburgh joined in the emigration, and the group Kendall recruited was referred to as the Berwick, or north of England settlers.
In his second annual report to the Court of Proprietors (at what we would call the Company's annual general meeting), at London on 10 March 1836, Kendall reported:
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I have much pleasure in stating that there will be a very considerable emigration of, principally, farmers from those quarters to the Company's lands this season; and those whom I have seen and conversed with are the best adapted for settlers, being persons of industrious habits, and accompanied by their wives and families and friends. I consider that there are fully as many as we can find room for this season; and I receive assurances that, if favourable reports were transmitted by these people, there would be a great increase in subsequent years.
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Title page of the New Brunswick Land Company's 1834 brochure, Practical information respecting New Brunswick.
Source : CIHM N.21463
An enthusiastic account of the party's arrival had already been reprinted from the British Colonist for the home audience:
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We have great pleasure in announcing the arrival, on Saturday last, of the ship D'Arcy from Berwick-upon-Tweed, after a very pleasant passage of 33 days, having on board 110 settlers for the N.B. Land Company. These people are regular practical farmers, of good character, and highly respectable appearance, and such persons as are destinated, at no distant date, to make apparent the agricultural capabilities of this fine province, and to produce the bread stuffs that have been hitherto imported into this country, thereby removing a reproach upon our industry, which has too long disgraced us. These people bring along with them the unsophisticated and gentle manners of "Merry England," with the beautiful associations of Border Ballad and Border chivalry. Much credit is due to Captain Kendle, for his judicious choice in peopling the Company's Land with a race of intelligent, hardy, industrious, and virtuous yeomanry. We feel assured that they will be favourably received, by the inhabitants of the district to which they are destined. We understand that hundreds more await only the favourable report of these people, to waft themselves and their little ones to this land of promise. - British Colonist, New Brunswick paper. (40)
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This nostalgic depiction of the Border English no doubt owes something to the ethnic predilections of the Colonist' s editor as well as to the novels of Sir Walter Scott. (41) But it must also be read in light of the fact that immigration into New Brunswick by this time was overwhelmingly Irish and increasingly Roman Catholic. (42) This was to prove an explosive mix in the succeeding decade. The arrival of Protestant English agriculturalists was therefore welcomed by residents concerned about the changing social and ethnic composition of the colonial population. This press account of the Berwick immigrants stands in remarkable contrast to the outpouring of journalistic outrage that had greeted the Company's proposal for juvenile immigration two years earlier. Kendall did not see this laudatory report immediately as he and his family arrived a month later on the Liverpool from the city of the same name.(43)
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Curiously, Lieut. Kendall had slammed English workingmen the year before, expressing a preference for the Irish in his annual report to the Company directors in England. Perhaps at that juncture he felt that they would have to accept the rising tide of Irish immigration as a given, or perhaps he intended the tale as a caution to English emigrants not to have excessive expectations. Be that as it may, he was soon on his way to recruit in the Borders. His curious diatribe was an aside to a description of New Brunswick culinary habits: "The mode of cookery at the taverns [in New Brunswick] is any thing but pleasant or agreeable," he had lamented. "Tea will be his beverage morning, noon, and night. Every farm-house has tea at every meal, and this is the great and constant complaint of the English. 'I don't mind the work,' say they, 'only give me beer;' and in default of which they go to rum; it is unfortunately too cheap." Kendall reported that "it is a wholesome draught of table beer that the working man requires, and without which the English labourer cannot, or what amounts to the same thing, fancies he cannot, work. This is one of the principal reasons why the greatest number of emigrants are Irish, on whom the effects of rum, though detrimental, are less so than on those unaccustomed to the use of spirits." He considered it "singular" that though there were "yearly importations, and those from the most disturbed districts of Ireland, where the very parties themselves have been guilty of the greatest atrocities, there is an almost total absence of crime in the province; the few petty thefts that have been committed, I am sorry to be compelled to say, have been almost invariably traced to the English emigrants, who, in general, have been so much petted and taken care of at home, that they are comparatively unfitted to be thrown on their own resources, and linger about the town till their last shilling is expended, instead of setting instantly and determinedly out in quest of work." (44) As it was, the Company intended that the Berwick emigrants be "petted and taken care of", conveyed directly to Stanley and provided with work, provisions, houses, and partially cleared farms.
Outbuildings at the substantial farm called Trows near Roxburgh. Stanley settlers Thomas Jaffrey and Susanna (Gray) worked at Trows from 1797 to 1810. In 1816 Thyomas was a hind in Scraesburgh, Jedburgh parish, and later still they resided at Yetholm. There they left several grown children when they sailed fro New Brunswick in 1836. As hinds were hired annually, such changes of residentce were frequent. Source: Bruce S. Elliott, 2002.
Though the Colonist termed the Berwick party "regular practical farmers" and "virtuous yeomanry", a new arrival of 1841 observed that "almost all the first settlers (who came out in 1836) were agricultural labourers, without any capital", (45) and the English press reports confirm this assessment of their status. All were literate, for we have their well-formed signatures on a later document. (46) Their literacy was a testimony to the comparatively secure lives of labourers in the Borders a generation earlier, as it was also to the Presbyterianism of the majority. Presbyterians emphasized the importance of being able to read the Bible for oneself. As most of the men were married, they were likely from the class of agricultural worker known as hinds, and we know this of a certainty for families whose occupations are given in some of the Presbyterian baptismal registers in the homeland.
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Most farms in the Borders were large, comprising hundreds of acres of productive land, and each farm typically had a row of stone cottages occupied by the hinds, or married farm workers. A description of farmsteads on the Scottish side of the border applies equally to those in northern Northumberland:
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Improved farmhouses, increasingly set aside from the steading, were based on 18th-century manses or minor lairds' houses, symmetrical to a plain, four-square, two-storey block with central staircase. Farm cottages too, estate- or farm-built, tended to be symmetrical, neat and functional in pairs or terraces. A row of such tied cottages, flower garden in front, vegetable garden behind, is still a distinctive landscape feature particularly in East and Midlothian and Berwickshire which, with 6-8 farm servants to a farm, had the largest labour teams in Scotland. The adjacent districts generally had 4-5. The cottages were occupied by married farmworkers, descendants in many areas of the previously dispossessed joint-tenant farmers; unmarried males were generally housed collectively in single-room bothies built into the steading. (47)
Village square in Swinton, Berwickshire, identifies the village as an Anglian foundation. Swinton was the ancestral home of Stanley's Kerr familiy. John Kerr met and married his wife while both were servants to a Capt. Hall at Annsfield in Coldingham, but returned as labourers to Swinton to have their younger children. Thomas's father was a shoemaker here. Source: Bruce S. Elliott, 2002.
Hinds were taken on each March at annual hiring fairs in the market towns, and received grain, peas, potatoes, coals, and money in addition to the tied cottage. (48)
The 1830s was a period of growing agricultural distress, though not attended in the Borders with the level of violence and incendiarism that alarmed the south of England in the same period. (49) In March 1835 and again in February 1836 meetings of proprietors and occupiers of land were convened in the market town of Wooler to petition Parliament for an official inquiry into the causes of the agrarian malaise besetting the kingdom. The immediate cause of distress was perceived locally to be "the progressive depreciation of prices ... bitterly ruinous to themselves and their families". (50) Rents, on the other hand, had not declined from the high levels attained during the prosperous years of the Napoleonic Wars.(51)
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The declining incomes of the farmers of course impacted negatively upon their ability to maintain labourers' wages. In December 1836 nearly 300 hinds from the Wooler district met at the Anchor Inn to seek improvements in their conditions of service. Their weekly wages did not exceed seven shillings, "a very inadequate remuneration for the labour of this valuable class men".They complained also of the traditional requirement that they provide the farmer with a young woman known as a bondager. The hind found her bed and board and paid her a wage, in return for which he retained the daily earnings from her field work. The intent of the system was that the hind and his family would clear a small profit from making the bondager's labour available to the farmer, but the earnings of female day labour had sunk to 8d, entailing a loss of as much as 30s. to a hind over the course of a year. (52) It is small wonder that the hinds were enticed by the prospect of emigrating to a colony where labour was scarce and remunerated sufficiently that farm ownership became an early prospect. Though the Company party may have come with little or no capital, they were expected to repay the passage money advanced to them within three years, and to rent or purchase lands from the Company.
From where did the emigrants come? The port of sailing, the attractive walled town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, is the most northeasterly of English ports. It is located not in Berwickshire, which is over the border into Scotland, but in the English county of Northumberland. The 110 D'Arcy emigrants were said to have come from in and around the town of Wooler, to the south of Berwick, but in fact only four families came from that parish, and two others from elsewhere in northern Northumberland. Two further families were English, but I have been unable to pinpoint their origins. Most of the families bore lowland Scots surnames and belonged to a number of bewilderingly fragmented denominations of Presbyterianism. (53) Another seven families were from Scotland, most from just over the border into Berwickshire and Roxburghshire, some having family connections on the English side of the line. The progenitor of the Currie family is said to have come from Fife, beyond Edinburgh, but his wife and children were born in England. We have the names of the adult males of the party from a letter they sent home in the autumn following their arrival. From this and various genealogical materials we can list the heads of families as follows: (54)
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Table 1 Origins of the Berwick Settlers, 1836
Most were allocated lots either side of the Stanley Road, just south of the Company's townsite, though Robert Waugh the schoolmaster, James Duncan, and Jonathan McDougall, a shoemaker, occupied houses in the Stanley town plot in 1837. (55) The settlers rented their properties at first, (56) but beginning in 1841 many began to purchase, though most took many years to pay off their instalments. (57
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To justify the transfer of such huge tracts of land to speculative corporations, and to attract settlers inland to their territories, the British North American land companies made substantial infrastructure commitments, and the New Brunswick Company was no exception. Consequently settlers coming onto company lands had higher expectations than those settling on Crown land or buying from individual speculators or earlier settlers. As an inducement, the Company promised to build houses for its early recruits, to have 5 acres already cleared for them, to support them with provisions, and to provide them with remunerative work on local roads. Ordinary settlers enjoyed none of these advantages, except perhaps the last. Arriving with higher expectations, Company settlers felt aggrieved when all these conditions were not fulfilled. This is not the place to go into detail about the arguments that arose between the Wooler immigrants and the Company, but they were well-documented. They were thoroughly investigated for Governor Sir John Harvey in 1837, and a satisfactory compromise was reached in 1838, after the settlers embarrassed the Company by appealing to the House of Lords. (58)
An unintended genealogical benefit of these disputes was that the ensuing investigations led to the preservation of a number of useful lists of the settlers, designed to bolster one side or other of the arguments: an abstract of Company money spent on the English settlers, an account of the livestock they owned in 1838, and their signatures on the petition to the House of Lords. (59)
In November 1836, however, they were willing to overlook their dawning grievances and agreed to compose a letter home to Wooler to be used by the company's agent Mr Nicholson in recruiting more settlers from their home area. (60) The Company also made liberal use of a volume it had published in London in March containing twelve lithographs of the Stanley settlement, quite the most ambitious publication undertaken by any of the British North American land companies. (61)
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Only two families left the settlement during the dispute with the Company, and it is not clear that they left because of it. Jonathan McDougall, the shoemaker from Coldstream in Berwickshire, left his house in Stanley village and was living on Smyth Street, York Point, Saint John County when his wife Jane died on 17 November 1837 at the age of 23. Jane's parents, Andrew and Ann Mather, had emigrated earlier from Northumberland to Otonabee Township near Peterborough, Upper Canada. The Mathers encouraged McDougall to relocate there, but he instead took up residence in Wickham, Queens County, New Brunswick. He remarried in 1844, practiced his trade for a few years in Port Hope, U.C., and then returned to Wickham, where he died in 1859. (62) Walter Dixon from Dryburn in Lowick parish, Northumberland, signed the Stanley settlers' petition to the House of Lords in February 1838 but not the agreement with the Land Company in June. He moved with his wife Jane Pringle and children to Tay Mills in Douglas parish.(63)
The Skye Settlers
The year that saw the arrival of the Wooler party also saw the arrival of a larger party of Gaelic-speaking Scots, some from Arisaig and Glengarry, but mostly from the Isle of Skye.(64) While Company Commissioner Kendall had begun recruitment in Northumberland in February 1836,(65) and the Berwick party had left for New Brunswick early in May, Company agent Norman R. Nicholson commenced recruitment in Skye only in July.(66) The party did not sail from Greenock until 1 September and arrived at Saint John aboard the Royal Adelaide only on 14 October, tragically late in the season.(67) Within two weeks temperatures had plunged to 7 to 10 degrees below freezing, and snow had begun to fall.(68) The houses that had been promised were unfinished, and the early start to winter made it impossible to complete the chimneys that season.
The Scots protested that the houses prepared for them were inadequate for the ensuing winter. The English immigrants reported with horror the deaths of many of the Scots as 41 of that party succumbed to cold.(69) The problem was compounded when the Scots refused offers of work, insisting that they were to be maintained at Company expense. They also claimed they had been misled into thinking their passages were free.
Table 3 Signers of petition of the Scottish settlers at Stanley, 1838
Source : PANB, RS24 1838/pe file 4, #77, January 1838
Officials asserted that part of the difficulty was that the Scots were Gaelic speakers, and that a man who had come on the same ship and been recruited as an interpreter proved himself a thorn in the Company's side and was dismissed from its service. Nonetheless, 15 of 33 who signed a petition of complaint appended their signatures rather than their marks and so had some measure of literacy in English. In the end Governor Harvey concluded that their recruitment had been injudicious at best, as most were fishermen unacquainted with the requirements for beginning agriculture in a wooded wilderness.(70) In the end the Company paid £6 per household to assist 38 or 39 of the families to move to Canada in 1838, which along with cancelling their debts cost the Company £4,000.(71) By 1851 only four families remained.
Table 4 Highland Scots remaining in Stanley, 1838 & 1851
C.O. 188/60, f. 144, 1838: Stanley parish census, 1851:
The Harvey Settlement
By the spring of 1837 the Company's New Brunswick activities were in abeyance because Commissioner Kendall had left the Company's employ and his replacement had not yet arrived. Into this administrative void sailed a second party of 137 Borders settlers, who arrived at Saint John from Berwick aboard the Cornelius of Sunderland on 14 July 1837.(72)
It will be recalled that the previous autumn the English emigrants at Stanley had given the Company's agent, Mr Nicholson, a letter addressed to "the Inhabitants of Wooler & Ford" endorsing his efforts to recruit further settlers for the Company lands near Stanley. At that time they had been willing to paper over their dawning grievances. They acknowledged that "the Contractors who engaged to prepare the Land for Crop, & Build Houses for our occupation failed to do their duty for want of Workmen" but asserted that "instead of being a disappointment we consider rather a fortunate circumstance, as every one has been allowed to chose his own Farm from the best Land round Stanley, and to have his House built to answer his taste & to suit the prospects of his Family."own Farm from the best Land round Stanley, and to have his House built to answer his taste & to suit the prospects of his Family." They were being given three years from the day of landing to repay their passage money, and reported favourably on the prices of farm produce, which were higher that year than normal.(73)
Although there is no longer a train station in the village Harvey in York County is still known as Harvey Station to distinguish it from the Harvey in Albert County, New Brunswick. Source, Bruce S. Elliott, 2002.
It is unclear from the documentation whether the agent Nicholson was the Norman Nicholson who had recruited the ill-fated Skye party the year before, or an Edward Nicholson who published a spirited defense of emigration to Canada (i.e. Upper Canada) in the Berwick Advertiser of 18 March 1837, writing from Newcastle-on-Tyne.(74)
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It likely was Edward, a 16-year resident of the Canadas, who made the rounds of inns at Morpeth, Wooler, Alnwick, and Newcastle through March and April recruiting labourers for the St Lawrence River Canal works.(75) He reportedly engaged "a considerable number of agricultural labourers in Glendale Ward ... who are not at liberty till after the 12 th of May". The Berwick Advertiser reported, confusingly, that 170 emigrants (in another place 110) sailed on the ship Cornelius the morning of 29 May for Saint John, "the male portion of which are engaged to work on the St. Lawrence Canal, and are principally from Wooler and Glendale Ward". Nicholson had advertised that he would be in Berwick on 26 May with a first class vessel to embark the labourers who had engaged with him for Canada, and perhaps this led the Advertiser to confuse the two parties.
The Cornelius had been advertised for New Brunswick, without reference to either Nicholson or the Company, by a different set of local agents.(76) Whether Edward Nicholson was simultaneously recruiting settlers for a St Lawrence canal contractor, or whether there were two different Nicholsons recruiting in the region at the same time, we may readily understand the reporter's confusion.(77)
The Black Bull Inn, Wooler, Northumberland, where a recruitment agent named Nicholson met with potential recruits for the St. Lawrence Canal works in Upper Canada through the spring of 1837. Was he the same Nicholson who was recruiting concurrently for the N.B. Land Company?
Source : Hamish Dunn, Wooler
As in the case of the D'Arcy, the safe arrival of the Cornelius was duly reported in the Berwick newspaper, but this time the report was not printed in full:
In a letter received in Wooler a few days ago from one of the passengers of the Cornelius, which sailed from Berwick with a number of emigrants for New Brunswick, it is stated that after a pleasant voyage of about six weeks they had arrived at St. John's all in good health; and that there had been two births on board in the course of the voyage.(78)
We are fortunate that a brief shipboard journal, believed to have been written by a member of the James Nesbitt family, survives (see sidebar). Apart from the usual seasickness and a heavy gale that lasted several days the voyage was uneventful. This time no one aboard died, and children were born at sea to Eleanor and William Grieve on 24 June and to Margaret and David Cesford on 4 July.(79)
On arrival all but two of the families from the Cornelius continued on to Fredericton aboard the Waterwitch steamboat, "where they received the unfavourable news that a stop had been put to the Company's works" .(80) pending the arrival of the new commissioner, Capt. Richard Hayne.(81) They also learned of the complaints of their English friends, which would erupt upon Hayne's arrival, and found the economy of the province, reported upon so glowingly the year before, staggering in the wake of an international financial crisis. They therefore appealed to Governor Sir John Harvey, arguing that "they had not left their native country to which they were much attached, through any disaffection but to improve if possible their situation" .(82) They petitioned to be allowed to clear a tract of land outside the territory of the Company, '"to be sold to them at as reasonable a rate as practicable, to be paid for by instalments within a given period."
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The Legislature debated how to respond to their application. Various members of the House pointed to "the most hyperbolical and extravagant inducements" held out to the immigrants in the Company's English pamphlets, and to "its poetical and highly-coloured statements" in the Royal Gazette.
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In the end the Legislature was swayed by the circumstances of the case. Echoing the favourable reports on the arrival of the D'Arcy the year before, Mr Clinch, one of the members, observed that it was well-known "that most of the emigrants to this country, and especially the Irish, came here only as a way to the United States; the best of them always went off, and the worst and most useless only remained. But these people were of a different class altogether." They had been "induced to leave comfortable homes" by extravagant promises that the Company was not in a position to fulfill, and as they had arrived in the wake of a commercial depression in "a year of considerable distress, wages were low, business was greatly stagnated, and a variety of circumstances operated, to prevent these persons from advantageously scattering throughout the Province" looking for work. Moreover, Clinch noted, they had some little capital with them, and were not seeking financial relief, merely the opportunity to buy and pay for lands that they could develop.
The Legislature voted the sum of £200 to defray the costs of locating them along a road then constructing between Fredericton and St Andrews, about 25 miles south of the city in what later became the parish of Manners Sutton.(83) It was named the Harvey Settlement, after the Governor. The colonial administration supplied a man to teach them to fell trees, and by paying them to work on the road enabled them to pay for their lots.(84) As this was a special government program, their progress was regularly reported upon.
We are fortunate to have a list of the immigrants, including wives and children, with names, ages, relationships and occupations, compiled in the autumn of 1837. It contains 146 names, setting aside two duplications, more than the 137 the newspaper reports having been aboard the Cornelius.
Table 5. Pop up link to table listing "Emigrants who ask for land on the New St Andrews Road. Source: PANB, RS 637,26d.
Table 5. "Emigrants who ask for land on the New St Andrews Road. Source: PANB, RS 637,26d.
Even so this number excludes Henry Craigs and his wife Isabella Kay (85) , William Patterson, and the Davidson family, all of whom were always understood to have been aboard; Craigs does appear on subsequent lists of members of the party allocated lands.(86) What is most striking about this party is the size of the families concerned. Few single men had been recruited, and many of the families had teenage or adult children who would be seeking land of their own within a few years. Perhaps this had been in the mind of the Company's agent. This time more of the settlers came from the Northumberland side of the border, and more were from the town or immediate vicinity of Wooler itself, probably a consequence of the letter sent home from Stanley the year before.(87) Thanks to this list, the occupational status of the males in the party is not in doubt: two-thirds were labourers, one a teacher, and eight were practitioners of various trades: 2 millers, 2 carpenters, and a mason, blacksmith, tailor, and shopkeeper. Where the individuals can be located in church registers, more exact descriptions of labouring occupations can sometimes be determined, as can the farms on which they were working when they had children baptized. Thomas Piercy, for example, was married at Ford in 1812. In 1813 he was steward at Fenton in Wooler parish. In 1814-16 he was in Readsford farm in Kirknewton parish, occupation not stated, but then in 1818 he was a husbandman in Thornington, and he worked as a hind there for most of the 1820s.(88)
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A number of the families in the 1837 Harvey group were related to one another. Thomas Brown was a brother of Alison Messer and Mary Wilson, Thomas and James Mowitt were brothers, Matthew Piercy was a married son of Thomas Piercy; William Embleton was a brother of Isabel Herbert, and three of the younger Embleton siblings accompanied the latter family. I have been able to identify no family relationships linking the D'Arcy and Cornelius parties, but some clearly knew one another. Jonathan McDougall from the D'Arcy, who was living at Gagetown in 1838, invited John Thompson, the schoolmaster who had arrived aboard the Cornelius , to come there to teach. Thompson replied that he had also been offered the Company school at Stanley, but that "there is no money and things [offer?] a very gloomy aspect and are becoming mor so every day.... there are several talking about clearing out in the spring if the Company does not go on". He had "made up my mind to go to Harvey's settlement along with my Countrymen ... although I may expect to undergo more privations for one year then in that you recommend me to". Thompson had already learned of the death of McDougall's wife and had reported it home in a letter to his father-in-law.(89)
The cottages in Reedsford Farm, Kirk Newton, Northumberland. Harvey settler Thomas Piercy was a steward at Fenton in Wooler in 1816, worked here at Reedsford from 1814-16, and then was a hind at Thornington farm from 1818-27. He attended the Presbyterian meeting house at Crookham throughout.
Source: Bruce S. Elliott, 2002.
A surveyor was employed to lay out 25 lots with a forty rod frontage either side of the new road to St Andrews, "extending back so as to comprise forty Acres, leaving in the rear sufficient Vacant land to enable each settler to extend his lot so soon as he might be able to purchase the additional quantity." The 24 heads of family balloted for their lots.(90) A list of these men in the Surveyor General's records, headed "Names of English Emigrants who have settled on lots of Land containing 40 Acres each in the Harvey settlement", includes Henry Craigs but omits the single men, including brother James Craigs, and it omits also two adult sons of the emigrant families. These eight appear, however, on the list of lots drawn, but with no lot numbers beside their names.(91)
List of Persons who Ballott[ed] for Land in the Harvey Settlement
L refers to the left or east side of the road heading south from Harvey Station; R refers to the right or west side of the road.
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* also on original list of heads of families who balloted for lots; here listed as a single man and annotated "see Memorial Ap26/41".
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Source : Alphabetized from PANB, RS 637 26d
The immigrants, with suitable instruction, commenced work in August and by winter had cleared about an acre and a half on each lot and constructed 21 log houses.(92) They nonetheless spent the winter of 1837-38 in Fredericton, "sheltered in the new Hospital".(93) Teamsters employed by the government conveyed "6 Loads of Emigrants & Provisions" to Harvey the ensuing April, so that they could plant their crops, and they were provisioned there through the spring. Unfortunately the season was inclement and the crops failed almost entirely. They continued to be provisioned by the Legislature, and the costs vastly exceeded the £200 voted, though some of the expenses were met from payments made for the settlers' work on the road. By the end of the first year there were 23 families on the land, consisting of 113 individuals. Two hundred acres had been cleared and 160 readied for planting.(94) The Commissioners appointed by the Legislature to oversee their location concluded, "For industry, sobriety, and perseverance No men can surpass them, while they only want an opportunity to introduce the most approved Systems of agriculture as now pursued in England." (95) By 1840 the acreage in crop had increased to 184, and by 1843 to 291½.(96)
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The settlers pursued a variety of strategies for making the best they could of their lands. John Cockburn by 1851 kept "a comfortable little inn" on the St Andrew's road, and "had several sons grown up, all of whom but one had already left him, and settled on farms of their own". John Thompson, the schoolmaster, was "not overpaid, nor above the necessity of mending his own clothes, and making shoes for his family." The nephew and namesake who had accompanied the Thompsons to New Brunswick had left the settlement. William Grieve, a shepherd from Whittingham, had arrived with only 7s 6d in his pocket, and had chosen not to begin work immediately on his lot at Harvey. He had hired himself out as a farm servant to Colonel Shore at Fredericton for £30 a year, and found work for his children as well. He paid his neighbours to clear his land for him, bringing some much needed cash into the settlement. After seven years the family took up residence, building a frame house immediately, "without the previous erection of a log-house". By 1850 he owned 700 acres and had clearings of 20 acres on each of three or four lots, "intended for his several sons". Grieve attributed his family's success to money "saved ... off their backs and their belly" and observed, "Though I might not have more comfort myself, there is the satisfaction of providing well for my family." (97)
Chain Migration into Stanley and Harvey
Some friends and relatives arrived over the next few years to join those who had settled before them at Stanley and Harvey, but the numbers were not large. Neither settlement precipitated a growing tide of Borders immigrants. Largely this was because the quality of the land and the underdevelopment of the colony allowed the possibility of a modest competency achieved through back-breaking labour, but held out little prospect of long-term prosperity or economic growth. Furthermore, neither the land company nor the colonial administration proved able to counter the strong promotional campaigns being mounted in Britain by the Canada Company. The Lower Canadian competitor, the British American Land Company, even entered into direct competition for Berwick emigrants, and the British press was awash with accounts of opportunities elsewhere. Chain migration into both of the New Brunswick communities therefore was limited, and consisted largely of close relatives of those already there, with the bulk of these going to Harvey. Most of the Company lands sold later at Stanley were acquired by existing residents of the province, rather than by new immigrants, and most later settlement on Company lands was in the southwestern part of its tract or to the north of Stanley rather than in Stanley itself. Much of the Company tract proved not to be cultivable. The New Brunswick Company staggered on till 1899, gradually selling off the lands they had spent so much money up front to render accessible.
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The Company did make one more attempt at overseas recruitment. Late in 1841 Col. Hayne asked established settlers for supportive letters. These were published in London two years later in a Company promotional pamphlet entitled Practical Information Respecting New Brunswick, but their content was not uniformly enthusiastic.(98)
Robert Waugh, (99) the former Wooler schoolmaster who had chaired the protest meetings during the settlers' earlier disputes with the Company, acknowledged (from Grand Manan) that "the emigrants from Northumberland being now in a fair way of prospering here, ... [they] may be referred to as an example of what may be accomplished in the woods of New Brunswick by perseverance and industry." He pointed to opportunities on the road between Cross Creek and Campbellton, and stated that its opening would facilitate trade with the Miramichi. But he also highlighted the Company's failings in that regard: "Its having been chopped down six years ago, a young growth of wood is now rising rapidly, and every year it remains unturnpiked it will be the more difficult and expensive to do."
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The Jaffray family from Roxburghshire seized the opportunity of a free letter home to advise that son George would arrive in Scotland the following autumn to encourage more of the family out to join them. But their report, too, contained thinly-veiled criticism: "The Company is doing a good deall of woork know, and it is the only thing that will settle the Company's land." The other Jaffrays remained in Scotland.(100) John Kerr (101) reported to his brother-in-law James Turnbull at Tweedmouth near Berwick, "I like the country better than at first, and if God spares us our health in a few years we will have a few acres clear of stumps, and plow it, and that will be a great ease to puting it in with the how. I think in a few years the Settlement where we live will be as pleasant as any in North America, and a good land, and healthy." He advised against the growing rage for going to New Zealand or Van Dieman's Land "for when they get there they must remain, for they cannot get away again." And, referring to Australian land companies but drawing also upon sad personal experience: "they promise great things, but they will not fulfil them."
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The other letters were from Protestant Irish immigrants who had come to the tract on their own, and from the local clergyman and several retired men of business from Manchester. Even the minister, initially brought in by the Company as the settlement's physician, admitted that "the road which was laid out in London on paper, goes through the very worst of the company's land for nearly sixteen miles" before reaching Stanley. Still, the bulk of the reports were positive, if not enthusiastic, and one of the Manchester gentlemen affirmed that the Company's publicity
now could be relied upon: "No puffing -- no flaming newspaper paragraphs have been resorted to." (102)
The colonial administration was similarly aware of the power of chain migration to populate new regions. In forwarding a report of progress in the Harvey Settlement in 1843 an official noted, "It is desirable that the accompanying return may be circulated among the Settlers friends and Countrymen in the North of England as well as in other parts of the United Kingdom So that the Capabilities of our new land Soil may apear.... whereon the Sober and industrious Emigrant may create a home under the protection of British Laws and in the enjoyment of British Institutions." (103) However, the greatest number of later Northumberland and Borders immigrants to come in any one year, eight families in 1842, had by then already arrived.
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Part of the reason for the limited long-term appeal of the two New Brunswick settlements was the wide publicity at home given to alternative possibilities. Upper Canada had long been the preferred destination for emigrants from the Borders, but even the appeal of such traditional destinations was being tempered by the rise of alternative fields for emigration. The Berwick press carried advertisements from landowners in Prince Edward Island, though noting that property there was leasehold and that "none need apply who cannot command £100 or upwards, to commence cultivation".(104) More attractive to the labouring class was an advertisement for shepherds in New South Wales, offering wages of £20-£25 yearly with board, lodging, and free passage.(105) The New Zealand Company was promoting its Colony of New Edinburgh,(106) and an article reprinted from the Scotsman even puffed emigration to the Falkland Islands.(107)
By this time, too, Berwick-upon-Tweed was dropping out of the emigrant trade, which was being prosecuted by ever-bigger vessels sailing from larger ports. In 1837 several ships had departed Berwick for British America with passengers, and in 1838 two went out in ballast. After that two or three a year brought Canadian timber to Berwick for sale, but no longer cleared from there for North America. The sole exception was the Berwick Castle, a new vessel launched locally in 1842 that took out intending settlers for the Canadas, mostly agricultural labourers and mechanics from the rural area, "not more than one or two of the town".(108) The following year a local agent offered to lay on the Rhodes for a sailing from Berwick to Quebec provided 100 passengers came forward, but the requisite number failed to materialize.(109) The newspapers were advertising sailings for Montreal from Newcastle and North Shields, and for Port Philip, Sydney, and Hobart from Leith (the port for Edinburgh).(110)
By studying the years of arrival noted in the 1851 census, and the genealogies of the Northumberland and Borders settlers, one can see that the nature of later overseas migration into the two New Brunswick communities of Stanley and Harvey was fundamentally different. The Company was never able to restore its tarnished reputation in Northumberland, and so Stanley saw few new arrivals from the Berwick area, though it did draw a continuing trickle of immigrants from other English regions. There was more chain migration into Harvey from Northumberland and the Borders as relatives and acquaintances of the 1837 settlers arrived to join them, but Harvey attracted few immigrants from elsewhere in Great Britain. Let us begin with the Stanley settlement.
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The New Brunswick Company was unable to entice relatives of their first party out to join kin in Stanley, and what little chain migration there was into that community from Northumberland owed little or nothing to Company efforts. Two Craigs families arrived with their families in 1843, but they came out originally to their father at Harvey, and only once in the province moved to Stanley to take up land in the new settlement at nearby Red Rock. George Turnbull, who also came in 1843, was recruited by family rather than by the Company, for he had left his native parish of Sprouston in Roxburghshire as a young man and worked as a stonemason in Liverpool. His arrival in Stanley with his wife and four English-born children was due to the presence of his brother David, who had come on the D'Arcy - but by 1861 George and his family had moved on once more.(111) Jane Taylor, a daughter of the Douglasses of the 1836 party, arrived with her children only in 1855, after being widowed.(112) This appears to be the sum total of chain migration into Stanley.
The village's one advantage was that it was convenient to the timber lands exploited in later years on the northern part of the Company's tract, and so the community did attract a few English settlers already in the province, and some new arrivals from other locations overseas. One English family arrived in 1840, another in 1841, and two in 1843. The 5 families that arrived in 1844, and 3 each in 1845, 1846, 1848, and 5 in 1850, may possibly have been attracted there by the New Brunswick Company's 1843 pamphlet, but they were from scattered locations all over England rather than from the Borders. Two families of 1844, for example, (the Clarksons and Wards) were from Yorkshire.(113) As a consequence Stanley by 1878 had a more diverse population than Harvey, with the English as likely to be Baptists or Plymouth Brethren as Presbyterians. After the middle 1840s the New Brunswick Company abandoned its efforts at direct overseas recruitment.
Cosseted by government after being stranded by the Company, it was the Harvey settlers who sent back to Northumberland the more favourable word of mouth. By 1843 the number of families at Harvey had grown to 45, some headed by children of the original Wooler settlers, some by later arrivals. They were producing 15,000 bushels of produce annually and had improvements worth over £4,200. They reported:
The Climate of New Brunswick agrees well with the Constitution of Englishmen; the Air is salubrious, and the Water as pure and wholesome as any in the World. During the Six Years of our Location but Two Deaths have occurred, while there have been Thirty-Nine Births without the Presence of Medical Aid. Six Years Experience has convinced us, that, notwithstanding the Privations to which new Settlers are exposed, Diligence and Perseverance must insure Success. (114)
Despite this optimism, and though the road on which the Harvey settlers had worked had become the post road from Fredericton to St Andrews, direct government action remained necessary to lure significant numbers of new settlers to the vicinity. A map of landowners in 1878 shows Harvey Settlement (by then in the parish of Manners Sutton) still as a solid block of English and Scots Presbyterians. To its east was the Cork Settlement, another government project for settlers who found themselves stranded in the colony. It was established in 1842 in response to a petition from 33 Irish Catholics from Cork and Kerry who had been "thrown out of employment" in Fredericton.(115) To the north was the smaller Acton Settlement of 1845, the rear lots occupied mostly by a small body of Irish Presbyterians, the front ones by more of the Cork Catholics.
The Harvey Settlers did manage to entice some kin and acquaintances out to join them, but their success was comparatively limited, especially when one contrasts their numbers with the achievements of chain migration elsewhere. For example, an Irish party of Tipperary Protestants, comparable in size to the Cornelius party, drew nearly 800 families to two locations in Upper Canada over three generations.(116) At Harvey, the 23 families and several single men of 1837, who had grown to 45 families by 1843, by 1851 numbered only 53 families, and a mere handful would arrive later. Six of these families were headed by adult sons of the original party, and some two dozen were later arrivals from Northumberland and the Borders.(117) Only four new families arrived before 1842, and the arrival of eight families in that year likely owed something to the well-publicized arrival of Thomas Craigs Sr the year before: more of him in a moment. Even this small accretion stands in favourable contrast to the dismal failure of Col. Hayne's intended publicity tour to Northumberland for the Land Company the same year. Further scattered families arrived in Harvey from the homeland in 1843, 1844, 1845, 1847, 1849, 1850, 1851, 1852, and 1853 before the chain of migration was severed.
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Despite his comparative poverty, Thomas Craigs was a respected elder in Wooler West Chapel, and following his departure his minister published a biographical sketch of the elderly emigrant in a Presbyterian magazine. He included the text of the sermon delivered on the eve of Craigs's departure (on the text "The Lord said unto Abraham, get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred and from thy father's house, unto the land that I will show thee"), and a letter Craigs wrote from Harvey in July 1841. The biography was subsequently reissued as a pamphlet. Though intended to promote piety rather than emigration, the publication also highlighted the courage and resourcefulness of 71-year-old Craigs, who had gone to Harvey with his wife and two youngest children to join the sons who had come on the Cornelius four years earlier. For us it is an informative document that discloses one means by which poor emigrants financed their passage, how they could reach New Brunswick after emigrant ships no longer called at Berwick, and the importance of the Scots religion to these residents of an English county where the ecclesiastical establishment was Anglican.
Born in Lanton, Northumberland in 1770, Thomas Craigs became, like his father Walter before him, a weaver at Milfield in Kirknewton parish. From childhood he attended the Scotch Church in Wooler known as Wooler West Chapel. He was for thirty years an elder and precentor (clerk) of the congregation, as well as a Sabbath-school teacher, and weekly he walked the 12 miles each way from Milfield to attend worship. A year before he emigrated he was presented by the congregation with a suit of clothes, a psalm book, and a pair of silver spectacles; the glasses are still in the hands of the family.
The weaving trade "at no time lucrative, was becoming daily more precarious" and he was persuaded by his sons to join them in Harvey. As he could not afford the fare he followed local precedent and raffled off a clock at a shilling a ticket. He succeeded in raising £8. When the winner, an army officer, learned of the old man's intentions he made him a present of the clock. The congregation then took up a subscription to supplement this, and paid the passages of Craigs, his wife, son, and daughter, and the costs of conveying them with their possessions to Liverpool. A gentleman of the congregation supplied horses and a servant to accompany them as far as Berwick. They sailed from there to Newcastle, and then travelled by rail to Carlisle and on to Liverpool. They were received cordially by the mayor, to whom their minister had sent a letter of introduction, and he found them berths on a timber trader, the Glengarry, bound for Saint John. After five weeks and four days at sea, they arrived in New Brunswick. The day after reaching Harvey, and having walked the 25 miles from Fredericton, Craigs trudged five miles to the nearest church and, in the absence of a minister, delivered an extemporaneous sermon: an impressive accomplishment for a man of 71.(118) The Rev. Daniel McCurdy, an itinerant Presbyterian, had begun visiting Harvey Settlement the year before, (119) and Craigs became a member of his congregation. He lived another 20 years, a respected elder in the new world as in the old.
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​Craigs's example probably convinced other Northumbrians to make the journey to Harvey in succeeding years, but few enough did so. The reasons why do not relate entirely to the successful promotion of alternative destinations. The deficiencies of the settlement itself, and of the colonial administration, also played a part. The best description we have of the Harvey Settlement comes from the pen of a lecturer in chemistry and mineralogy at the University of Durham who visited there in 1849. James F.W. Johnston had been invited to New Brunswick by the House of Assembly to report upon the agricultural potential of the various counties while on a longer tour of the eastern United States. Though he found Harvey an exception to "the general poor character of the land", even there "the cultivated land ... lies on a succession of low ridges, between which cedar-swamps of greater or lesser extent intervene, and interfere both with regular clearing and cultivation, and with the continuity of farms". The immigrants of 1837 were by then "becoming straitened for room. They complain bitterly that all the good land within immediate reach has been granted to speculators".(120) Indeed, the settlers had petitioned the House of Assembly as early as 1840, complaining of an unimproved tract granted to Beverley Robinson, Esq. on the St Andrew's Road.(121) By the time of Johnston's visit, a second tier of lots had been taken up behind the first farms along the road, and in 1850 a 1000-acre tract on Oromocto Lake granted to Capt. John Campbell had been resurveyed and was being taken up by later arrivals from the Borders, the Rutherfords and Swans first among them. This was the beginning of the Tweedside settlement. Other late arrivals, and members of the second generation of the Cornelius party, would also in time obtain lands on the 1,500-acre Simonds and Beauchant tracts that straddled the road between Tweedside and Harvey.
Johnston noted that "behind the second tier of farms are extensive carriboo plains and pine-swamps as far as the Magadavic Lake; but, exploring in search of good land, the young pioneers of the settlement have discovered a tract of rich hardwood land in the midst of the wilderness beyond this lake, to which there is at present no access for want of roads, and no facility of settlement, because of its present remoteness from all human habitations. It is by such explorations, the results of natural expansion, that the better lands are discovered, and the means of successful extension afforded to the families of the older settlers." The lack of road access was decisive, however, and settlement in Harvey continued to move back onto less attractive lands in the third and fourth tiers of lots.
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The Durham lecturer reported that after 11 years wheat was still being sown among the stumps on the burned land, but that oats and potatoes were a more important crop for local consumption. Harvey Settlement already was famed for its Timothy seed. In 1848 the farmers sold 800 bushels, "but, to the discredit of the province, which ought to have bought it for home consumption, it was carted fifty miles to Calais, and there sold for transport to the Boston market". Though enjoying comparative prosperity, the 1837 immigrants explained to Johnston, "A man must work as hard here as at home, and longer hours. He must build his own house, make his own family's shoes, and do many other things. A useless man need not come here." Yet, Johnston added, "if a piece of good land was to be got handy, many of their friends were ready to come from home to join them."
After returning to England Johnston visited the settlers' ancestral territory in Northumberland between Cornhill and Yetholm, and found the farmers, alarmed at the sinking price of grain, laying off their labourers. Johnston thought this foolish "in such a half-pastoral district as that". But he also felt that the indifferent quality of the land and the lack of ready access to markets made the Harvey Settlement a poor prospect for further immigration. "Had I known of a bit of good land 'handy' to that settlement," he concluded, "I could have felt in my heart to urge them to make up a party among themselves with the view of going there, and to offer to aid them in their views. Every one such man would be an invaluable gain to the province of New Brunswick." But he did not, and emigration to Harvey Settlement from Northumberland and the Borders ceased shortly after his book was published, nor were there many accessions to the population from elsewhere in the decades that followed.(122)
References
Bruce S. Elliott is a Professor of History at Carleton University in Ottawa, and Director of the Carleton Centre for the History of Migration. He wishes to thank Jocelean Swan Hall, Eric Herbert, Tony Brown, Tim Patterson, Linda Bankier of the Berwick-upon-Tweed Record Office, and Hamish Dunn of Wooler, Northumberland for their assistance. As in any project concerning the residents of nineteenth-century New Brunswick, Daniel Johnson's published abstracts of newspaper birth, marriage, and death notices were essential references, but they are not individually footnoted here.
Notes
(1) Anatole Browde, "Settling the Canadian Colonies: A Comparison of Two Nineteenth-Century Land Companies", Business History Review 76 (Summer 2002): 299-335 (re Canada Company and BALC); Miramichi Gleaner , 23 October 1831.
(2) Report of the Directors of the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia Land Company (London: Arthur Taylor, 1832), Canadian Institute for Historic Microreproductions (CIHM) fiche N.63916, pp. 8, 11.
(3) Clarence Karr, The Canada Company (Ottawa: Ontario Historical Society, 1974), 51, 102.
(4) J.I. Little, "Feast or Famine: The British American Land Company and the Colonization of the St Francis Tract", in his Nationalism, Capitalism, and Colonization in Nineteenth-Century Quebec: The Upper St Francis District (Kingston & Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1989), 36-63.
(30) Lucille Campey, 'A Very Fine Class of Immigrants': Prince Edward Island's Scottish Pioneers, 1770-1850 (Toronto: Natural Heritage, 2001), chap. 5.
(5) CIHM N.63916.
(6) R.F. Fellows, Community Placenames in New Brunswick, Canada (Fredericton: PANB, 1998), 31.
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(7) Suffolk Chronicle, 30 June 1832, p. 1, col. 2.
(8) There was an especially large concentration of Norfolk immigrants in Blenheim Township, Oxford County, Upper Canada. On Cattermole's Guelph party, see Glenn Wright, The Caroline and her Passengers, March-May 1832 (Guelph: Wellington County Branch, Ontario Genealogical Society, 2002)
(9) Many of Lake's recruits for Bury Township in the BALC's St Francis Tract moved across the border into the United States in quest of a better livelihood. Bruce S. Elliott, "Regional Patterns of English Immigration and Settlement in Upper Canada", in Barbara Messamore, ed., Canadian Migration Patterns from Britain and North America . Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2004): 62-5; Little, Nationalism, Capitalism, 47.
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(10) Bruce S. Elliott, Irish Migrants in the Canadas: A New Approach (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, second edition, 2004), 137-40.
(11) James Scott, The Settlement of Huron County (Toronto, 1966), 167.
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(12) Sir John Harvey, C.O. 188/60, f. 136, National Archives of Canada reel B-14. The 1878 map of Stanley in the Atlas of York County, New Brunswick (Frederiction: Halpenny & Co., 1878) reveals the abandonment of some lands on the original Stanley Road for better lands to its east and west, and especially to its north.
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(13) It was noted in 1861 that "the original foundation, doubtless, contemplated it for a poorer class than for whom custom and high character of the school have rendered it available for. It is, perhaps, the most important educational establishment in the country." Samuel Low, Jun., The Charities of London (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1861) on www.londonancestor.com/charity/college/christs-hospital.htm.
(14) Rev. Frank Baird, History of the Parish of Stanley and its Famous Fair (Fredericton, 1950), 89-91, identifies [Henry] Bendell, Richard Bellamy, --- Bloom, --- Cooper, John Harvey, George Howell, Chris Kelly, George Linnell, and John Thomas. Ivan Saunders adds --- Glover and "Red Will" Thomas from the notes of Mrs Arthur Pringle, though he notes that there was some doubt about the last. Ivan Saunders, "The New Brunswick and Nova Scotia Land Company and the Settlement of Stanley, New Brunswick" (UNB MA thesis, 1969), 213. See also Velma Kelly, The village in the valley: a history of Stanley and vicinity (Stanley, 1983), 14.
(15) The first appearance of the Blue Coat School story was in the 1892 obituary of Richard Bellamy, a CFS boy who left Stanley for Lower Southampton, York County, and became a surveyor, lumberman, and member of the provincial legislation. Fredericton Herald, 3 December 1892, quoted in Baird, Stanley, 124.
(16) There is a large literature on home children, the most recent of which is Marjorie Kohli, The Golden Bridge: Young Immigrants to Canada, 1833-1939 (Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 2003).
(17) Geoff Blackburn, The Children's Friend Society: Juvenile Emigrants to Western Australia, South Africa and Canada 1834-1842 (Northbridge, W.Aus: Access Press, 1993) , 255-6.
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(18) New Brunswick Courier, 11 January 1834, p. 2, col. 7.
(19) New Brunswick Courier, 22 January 1834, p. 2, col. 5.
(20) Quoted in New Brunswick Courier , 25 January 1834, p. 2, cols. 6-7.
(21) New Brunswick Courier, 18 January 1834, p. 2, cols. 6-7; p. 3, col. 1; 15 March 1834, p. 4, col. 2.
(22) General Report on the Tract of Land purchased from Government, by the New Brunswick Land Company, CIHM fiche N.8808, 26, balance sheet for 1835.
(23) Not that Harry Potter!
(24) New Brunswick Courier, 18 June 1836, p. 2, col. 3
(25) Blackburn, Children's Friend Society, 246-7.
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(26) The Times, 14 May 1839, p. 7. Mrs Harvey's second husband was J. White of 33 James Street, Manchester Square, London.
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(27) Blackburn, Children's Friend Society, 239-51, 289.
(28) Gravestone, Stanley Protestant Cemetery.
(29) Frank Baird, Parish of Stanley ; Velma Kelly, Village in the Valley.
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(30) Lucille Campey, 'A Very Fine Class of Immigrants': Prince Edward Island's Scottish Pioneers, 1770-1850 (Toronto: Natural Heritage, 2001), chap. 5.
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(31) Numbers extracted from the shipping news in the Quebec Gazette newspaper, some of the details confirmed by similar columns in the Berwick Advertiser. The Berwick-upon-Tweed Archives is assembling a statistical dataset from the latter source. For details of an emigrant voyage from Berwick to Quebec in 1834, see Daniel James Brock, "The Account of Two Families Who Settled Near Simcoe", Ontario History, LVIII, no. 1 (March 1966): 43-57. Edward J. Cowan, "From the Southern Uplands to Southern Ontario: Nineteenth-Century Emigration from the Scottish Borders", in T.M. Devine, ed., Scottish Emigration and Scottish Society (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1992), 61-83, discusses movement to the Guelph/Galt area of Ontario from the central and western Borders, but does not discuss Berwickshire, nor does he mention Berwick as an emigration port.
(32) In December 1836 the Berwick newspaper printed an encouraging letter from James Purves, a Berwick stonemason who had been transported to Van Dieman's Land, but was now "behaving uncommonly well", enjoying constant employment, and expecting to obtain his freedom in a week or two. Berwick Advertiser, 10 December 1836, p. 4, cols. 2-3.
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(33) Lieut. Edward Nicholas Kendall, R.N. was a surveyor by training and had served in that capacity on a number of Arctic and Antarctic expeditions with Sir John Franklin and others. After returning to England he applied in 1838 for a return to naval service, but appears to have gone to South Australia as an employee of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners. Such shifts of employment between private and governmental emigration and settlement agencies, and from one colony to another, was by no means uncommon. C.O. 188/61, ff. 345-52, reel B-15. Kendall was married in 1832 at St Alphage, Greenwich, Kent, to Mary Anne Kay (IGI), and a daughter was baptized in Saint John in 1834. He died in Southampton, England in 1845, as marine superintendent of the Peninsula and Oriental Steam Company. Obituary, The Times, 15 February 1845, p. 7.
(34) General Report, CIHM N.8808, 28.
(35) Their offer was nonetheless reported in the Berwick Advertiser, 14 May 1836, p. 4, col. 3.
(36) General Report, CIHM N.8808, 28-9.
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(37) Berwick Advertiser, 14 May 1836, p. 4, col. 3; 21 May 1836, p. 4, col. 6; Friends of Berwick and District Museum and Archives Newsletter, no. 27, June 2000.
(38) New Brunswick Courier, 25 June 1836, p. 2, col. 6. John Harvey, the CFS boy, wrote home in 1838 that there had been 104 in the English party, comprising 15 families. Blackburn, CFS, 245.
(39) Berwick Advertiser , Saturday, 24 September 1836, p. 2, col. 4.
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(40) Berwick Advertiser, 13 August 1836, p. 4, col. 4.
(41) On the influence of Scott on the creation of a Borders identity, see Claire Lamont, "The Discovery of the Borders: Sir Walter Scott" in Donald Omand, ed., The Borders Book (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1995), 147-59 and Iain G. Brown, ed., Abbotsford and Sir Walter Scott: the Image and the Influence (Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 2003).
(42) Peter Toner, "The Origins of the New Brunswick Irish, 1851", Journal of Canadian Studies 23, nos. 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 1988): 104-19.
(43) New Brunswick Courier, 2 July 1836, p. 2, col. 5.
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(44) CIHM N.8808, pp. 11-2.
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(45) Letter of James Neales, Stanley, 9 November 1841, reprinted by the Company in Practical Information Respecting New Brunswick (London, 1843), 35 from the Doncaster Gazette of 21 January 1842. CIHM N.21901.
(46) C.O. 188/61, ff. 388-9, NA reel B-15.
(47) John Baldwin, Exploring Scotland's Heritage: Edinburgh, Lothians and Borders (Edinburgh: The Stationery Office,1997), 77.
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(48) Berwick Advertiser, 4 March 1843, p. 4, col. 7 and 11 March 1843, p. 4, col. 2; Second Statistical Accounts for Cockburnspath and Roxburgh parishes, stat-acc-scot.edina.ac.uk.
(49) The Berwick Advertiser attributed the relative peace of the Borders to "that education, literary and religious, which is afforded to the lower classes": 10 October 1835, p. 4, col. 1.
(50) Berwick Advertiser, 21 March 1835, p. 1, col. 2; 27 February 1836, p. 4, col. 3. The average price of wheat had declined from 64s 3d to 36s per quarter since 1830: ibid., 6 February 1836, p. 1, col. 6.
(51) J.S. Donaldson, "To the Agriculturists of North Northumberland", Berwick Advertiser, 20 February 1836, p. 1, col. 5.
(52) Berwick Advertiser, 17 December 1836, p. 4, col. 4.
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(53) Like many of the emigrants from southwestern Northumberland who went to London Township, Upper Canada: J.E. McAndless, "Telfer Cemetery (English Settlement) London Township", Families 14, no. 3 (Summer 1975): 71-8; F.T. Rosser, London Township Pioneers (Belleville: Mika Publishing, 1975), 29, 2\90-4, 95-9, 122-6; Jennie Raycraft Lewis, 'Llyndinshire': London Township (London, 1967), 25-7.
(54) Kelly, p. 13; C.O. 188/60, ff. 153-4, NA reel B-14. As hinds were employed on an annual basis, some moved every year. The place of residence in my table is the latest one so far identified.
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(55) Robert Waugh, "Sketch Plan with the Names of the Occupiers of Houses in the Town of Stanley", 11 October 1837, National Map Collection, NMC 638.
(56) The Company was to receive title from the Crown only when "the whole of the purchase money shall have been paid". Realizing that they could not "give a good title to a man who may wish to lease or purchase a village lot or land for a farm because they have none", the Company applied in 1839 to alter the terms of its contract. PANB, RS 344/C/3d, [NBLC] to Sir John Harvey, Fredericton, 2 August 1839.
(57) Don Dixon has published in Generations 22, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 15-25 a useful index to transfers of title from the Company. His list derives from the York County Registry Office grantees index, but the Company, like the Crown, granted deeds only when a lot was fully paid for. Individuals who did not complete their purchases therefore do not appear. The Company's Land Grant Cash Payment Books (PANB, MC 1284, Series MS3) include the names of original and subsequent locatees with dates of original sale agreement and of payments made. Unfortunately dates of assignment prior to deed were seldom recorded, so it is not always clear who was making the payments. Don Dixon suggested that the Company only leased out land before 1844, but a number of the Berwick settlers initiated purchase in 1841, and in that same year several wrote home noting that it was then possible to purchase: CIHM N.21901, 26 ff.
(58) Petition to the Lords: C.O. 188/61, ff. 388-9, NA reel B-15; agreement, 15 June 1838, C.O. 188/60, ff. 149-50, reel B-14. The "English emigrants at Stanley" appear to have petitioned the Commons as well: Durham University Library, Archives & Special Collections, Papers of 3rd Earl Grey, N.B. and N.S. Land Company, GRE/B146/A1-11. Even the CFS boy, John Harvey, wrote home to his mother about how Captain Haynes had "behaved most shamefull" to the settlers. Blackburn, CFS , 245.
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(59) C.O. 188/60, ff. 155, 158, reel B-14; C.O. 188/61, ff. 388-9, reel B-15.
(60) C.O. 188/60, ff. 153-4, Stanley, 26 November 1836.
(61) Sketches in New Brunswick (London: Ackermann & Co., March 1, 1836), CIHM N.36445.
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(62) McDougall is identified as one of the Berwick party solely by his signature on the 1836 letter the settlers sent back to Wooler, though he also appears on Waugh's 1837 village plan, NMC 638. Trent University Archives, Peterborough, 76-1012, Andrew & Ann Mather to Jonathan MacDougall, Otonabee, 21 July 1839; and marriage and death notices in Daniel Johnson's newspaper abstracts. The Mathers were from Old Newlands in Bamburgh parish: inscriptions, Keene Upper Cemetery, Otonabee, Ontario (www.nexicom.net/~resson/Cemeteries/KeeneUpperCemetery.htm). See also PANB, Dunham & McDougall Family, MC167.
(63) Walter Dixon's wife Jane Pringle was no close relation of the Pringle family that also came on the D'Arcy She was a daughter of Richard Pringle, a weaver in Fenham, Kyloe parish. Family letters and genealogical information courtesy Don Dixon, Fredericton.
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(64) In 1835 the Company paid £30 "travelling expenses to Scotland" for Andrew Duncan (the agent at Campbell?); it is not known whether this trip had any connection with the emigration from Skye and Glengarry the following year. CIHM N.8808, 26.
(65) C.O. 188/57, f. 58, reel B-12.
(66) PANB, House of Assembly Sessional Papers, RS24 1838/pe file 4, no. 77, petition of James MacKinnon and 32 other Scottish immigrants.
(67) The party traveled on to Fredericton aboard the steamboat Novelly . New Brunswick Courier, 15 October 1836, p. 2, col. 3; 22 October 1836, p. 2, col. 2.
(68) City Gazette, 27 October 1836, p. 2, col. 5; Weekly Chronicle, 28 October 1836, p. 2, col. 6.
(69) PANB, RS24 1838/pe file 4, no. 77; RS24 1838/re file 1; C.O. 188/60, ff. 142-4, petition of John McLennan and ten other Scottish immigrants.
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(70) C.O. 188/60, ff. 134-5, reel B-14.
(71) C.O. 188/61, ff. 143, 148.
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72. New Brunswick Courier , 15 July 1837, p. 3, col. 2.
73. C.O. 188/60, ff. 153-4, Stanley, 26 November 1836.
74. Berwick Advertiser , 18 March 1837, p. 2, col. 3, writing from Newcastle 14 March in response to a letter from "Spectator" in the issue of 4 March 1837, p. 2, col. 4, who had advised against emigration and emigration societies on the basis of what Nicholson condemned as seriously outdated literature. To compound matters, the interpreter for the Skye party was a Samuel Nicholson.
75. Berwick Advertiser, 1 April 1837, p. 1, col. 2.
76. Berwick Advertiser, 15 April 1837, p. 4, col. 2; 20 May 1837, p. 1, col. 3; 27 May 1837, p. 4, col. 3; 3 June 1837, p. 4, col. 3.
77. The Advertiser does not report any other major emigration in 1837, however, and the Quebec Gazette notes only 21 passengers arriving from Berwick that season.
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(78) Berwick Advertiser, 19 August 1837, p. 4, col. 4, courtesy Eric Herbert.
(79) Transcribed by the late Thelma Larner, a Nesbitt descendant, and sent by another descendant, Sharon Howland of Waltham, Mass. to Jocelean Swan Hall of Harvey, and published in the Harvey Lionews , June 1994. My thanks to Jo Hall for this item. The second birth entry was mistranscribed "The 4th a child was born by Margrateses for it on bord": I suspect the true reading is "Margrat Cesford on bord".
(80) John Thompson, "An account of the original Settlement of Harvey", ms. written late in life; copy provided by Jocelean Swan Hall of Harvey. See also New Brunswick Courier, 29 July 1837, p. 1.
(81) Rev. William Randall, History of Harvey Settlement , typescript at PANB, MC 80/818, 1972. My thanks to Denis Noel for directing me to Bill Randall's history. Capt. Richard Hayne was born in Devon in 1804, probably a son of Rev. W. Hayne, Vicar of Plympton, for the latter's daughter Melanie was married at Harvey in 1844 . Hayne served with the Royal Artillery in St Helena and in Canada with the Royal Staff Corps on the Rideau Canal Works. In 1835 he was an employee of the British American Land Company, supervising the survey of that company's St Francis Tract in Lower Canada. He went to England in 1836 and arrived in N.B. the following year, being appointed the NBLC Commissioner on 6 December 1837. He returned to England in 1870 and died in Dittesham, Devon, in 1874. He is recorded with his family in the 1851 census of Fredericton. New Brunswick Courier, 29 June 1844; I.L. Hill, The Old Burying Ground Fredericton, N.B. , vol. 3, pp. 235-43; J.I. Little, ed., Love Strong as Death: Lucy Peel's Canadian Journal, 1833-1836 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001), 159, 223.
(82) John Thompson ms.
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(83) New Brunswick Courier, 29 July 1837, p. 1, cols. 2-4.
(84) Randall, History of Harvey Settlement.
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(85) Helen C. Craig, The Craigs of Harvey Settlement, Red Rock and the Pontiac (Fredericton, 1999), 463.
(86) Bear in mind that two families were said not to have gone on to Fredericton immediately after landing.
(87) C.O. 188/60, ff. 153-4, NA reel B-14, addressed to "the Inhabitants of Wooler & Ford". Though signed by all the adult males of the D'Arcy party, the only document that is, it was likely written by Robert Waugh, the former Wooler schoolmaster, whose signature appears first.
(88) Berwick-upon-Tweed Record Office, Crookham Presbyterian Church baptisms.
(89) PANB, MC 167, Dunham and McDougall family collection, John Thompson to Jonathan McDougall, Stanley, 1 February 1838. Robert Waugh, the teacher from the 1836 Stanley party, was working as a surveyor for the Land Company, but about 1840 opened a school on Grand Manan; he returned to Stanley a few years later. PANB, RS 655, petition of Robert Waugh, reel F10327. Thompson was licensed by the York County Board of Education on 2 April 1838 and taught at Harvey for many years. RS 655, reel F10334.
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(90) PANB, RS 24, Assembly Sessional Papers, 1838, re 1, Report of ... Commissioners appointed in July last for locating sundry English Emigrants, 16 February 1838.
(91) PANB, Records of the Surveyor General, RS 637, 26d, contains these two lists plus the detailed list of families alluded to earlier.
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(92) PANB, RS 24, 1838, re 1.
(93) John Thompson ms.
(94) PANB, RS 24, 1839 re5, Accounts of Commissioners for English Emigrants, 24 January 1839, and Report of the Commissioners for locating the Northumberland Emigrants, 2 March 1839.
(95) PANB, RS 24, 1838, re 1.
(96) Returns of Harvey Settlement, 1840, from Journal of House of Assembly , 1841, Appendices, p. cli, and 1843 from NA, MG9 A1, vol. 123, p. 89, reel M-1670.
(97) James F.W. Johnston, Notes on North America: Agricultural, Economical, and Social (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1851), Vol. II, 168-78; CIHM no. 35750. My thanks to Tim Patterson for this reference.
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(98) London: Pelham Richardson, 1843, CIHM N.21901.
(99) Robert Waugh (c1797-1854) was a teacher residing in Legget's Land, Haugh Street, Stockbridge, Edinburgh when he married in 1826 at Edinburgh St Cuthbert, in the shadow of the Castle, to Isabella Hood, daughter of Andrew Hood, a Jedburgh brewer. He was a schoolmaster in Wooler, and an Anglican, and he continued to teach as well as to do survey work in New Brunswick. He prepared the Company's early plan of Stanley village. After teaching on Grand Manan, he returned to Stanley, where he died in the woods after becoming lost on a cold night in 1854. There is a portrait in Frank Baird's 1950 history of Stanley, p. 132.
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(100) Thomas Jaffrey worked at the farm called Trows in Roxburgh parish from 1797 to 1810, and in 1816 was a hind at Scraesburgh, Jedburgh parish (parochial registers); they seem later to have moved to Yetholm. Son John was a labourer in Town Yetholm in 1841, and daughter Susan married James Welsh, a shepherd in Cherrytrees Hillhead in that parish; there is a gravestone to this couple at Yetholm. It appears that Margaret Jaffrey, the wife of David Turnbull, also among the Stanley settlers, was a daughter of Thomas Jaffrey; the latter's widow Susan (Gray), "formerly of Yetholm, Roxburghshire", was reported in the press in 1857 to have died at her daughter's residence in Stanley.
(101) John was the son of Thomas Kerr, a shoemaker in Swinton near Coldstream, Roxburghshire, and his wife Janet (Huntley). In 1827 he married a fellow servant of Captain Hall of Annsfield, Coldingham, Berwickshire Jane Turnbull, daughter of James Turnbull Sr., a military pensioner in Berwick. They were back in Swinton by 1832, where John worked as a labourer. Parochial registers of Coldingham and Swinton; for the parents: 1841 census of Swinton, 755/1, p. 11.
(102) CIHM N.21901.
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(104) Berwick Advertiser, 26 March 1842, p. 1, col. 3; 4 March 1843, p. 1, col. 1.
(105) Ibid., 9 December 1837, p. 1, col. 5.
(106) Ibid., 5 August 1843, p. 1, col. 2.
(107) Ibid., 8 January 1842, p. 4, col. 6.
(108) Berwick-upon-Tweed Record Office, shipping data base; Berwick Advertiser, 7 May 1842, p. 2, col. 1; 25 June 1842, p. 4, col. 4.
(109) Berwick Advertiser, 22 April 1843, p. 1, col. 4.
(110) Ibid., 12 February 1842, p. 1, col. 2; 4 June 1842, p. 1, col. 1.
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(111) 1851 census of Stanley; IGI; correspondence with Brant Gibbard, a descendant of a third brother who remained in Scotland as a farm steward.
(112) Jane Douglass, daughter of the D'Arcy emigrants John Douglass and Isabel (Wilson) was baptized at Ellingham, Northumberland in 1809 and married William Taylor at Whittingham in 1835. On Jane Taylor see www.rubycusack.com/issue209.html.
(113) They may be identified in the Mormon IGI.
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(114) British Parliamentary Papers, Emigration , vol. 4, p. 23 (Irish University Press).
(115) Ibid., pp. 22-5; Royal Gazette , 26 August 1847, p. 3453, quoted in Colleen Kennedy's website on the Cork Settlement: www.colleenkennedy.com/Genealogy/Cork Settlement/. One can see in the 1851 census that the immigration dates of the Cork Settlement Irish mostly predated 1842.
(116 ) Elliott, Irish Migrants in the Canadas.
(117) Johnston, Notes on North America. The numbers may be approximately verified from the 1851 census of Kingsclear parish. The Harvey settlers and the later arrivals there appear on pp. 21-22 and 36-43 of the original return, National Archives of Canada reel C-998.
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(118) Rev. Thomas Gray, Sketch of the Life of Mr Thomas Craigs, lately elder and precentor in the Scottish Church, Wooler, Northumberland, extracted from the Scottish Christian Herald, Second Series, Vol. III, No. 153, p. 771, &c (Edinburgh: John Johnstone, 1842). Typescript in Berwick-upon-Tweed Record Office, C4/27. The vessel was identified by Helen Craig from the details given in two letters from Craigs appended to his biography. Helen C. Craig, The Craigs of Harvey Settlement, Red Rock and the Pontiac (1999), 6. Craigs' parentage was identified in 2002 by Tony Brown of Beal, Berwick, a descendant of Thomas's brother Luke, who remained in Britain.
(119) Heather Long, "Rev. Daniel McCurdy's Baptisms and Marriages of 1834-1854", Generations 21, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 46-51 prints the baptisms and marriages of the Harvey settlers from McCurdy's register at the Public Archives of Nova Scotia. The marriage entries are incomplete. From 1856 onward the registers of Harvey United Church pertain to this Presbyterian congregation: PANB, reel F65.
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(120) Johnston, Notes on North America, II, 168-78. On his purpose, see Report on the Agricultural Capabilities of the Province of New Brunswick (Fredericton: J. Simpson, 1850), CIHM no. 43053.
(121) Journal of the House of Assembly of New Brunswick, 1840, p. 93. My thanks to Jocelean Swan Hall for this reference.
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(122) Johnston, Notes on North America. See also the 1881 census, and the details concerning the foreign-born in the census of 1901.