Past Lives: Black River

In Simonds Parish of Saint John County, New Brunswick lies the village of Black River.  It was founded in 1853 by some of the first Irish and black families to settle in the area and quickly became known for its shipbuilding facilities at the mouth of the nearby river that bears the same name.

A scandal erupted in 1869 when the remains of a woman and child were found near Black River Road by men who were picking blueberries.  The ensuing investigation found that a respectable architect from the city of Saint John had an extramarital affair with a young woman who had a child by him, and he killed them both in an attempt to keep it secret.  The man was tried, convicted, and executed by hanging.

By 1898 Black River and its surroundings was a thriving farming and fishing settlement with a post office, store, sawmill, two churches and a population of 200.  Prominent business and property owners included families named Matthews, Connacher, Power, and Hawkes.

At the corner of present-day County Road 825 and Duffy Road sits the St. Patrick's Catholic Church and adjoining cemetery.  One of its first priests was Father Andrew Barron who included the church in his circuit from Saint John.  Unfortunately due to the steep decline of the number of parishoners in recent years, the building has fallen into disrepair and is slated to be demolished.

The area has now mostly gone back to forest except for a few farms, gravel pits, and a community club.  A large concrete and stone wharf in the river is a remnant of what was once one of the main industries.

*Photo courtesy of Debbie Hamilton-Bernard, 2016

A Family Homestead

The town of Montreal South was created from land of the Saint-Antoine-de-Longueuil Parish in 1888, and divided into building lots by developer George Parent.  In 1889 a station house was built for the Grand Trunk Railway tracks, connecting the community to Montreal.  The official incorporation as a town came in 1905 and in 1906 the newly-formed Montreal & Southern Country Railway built a trolley station to transport workers to the factories along the Lachine Canal.

The house at 16 Prefontaine Street was either built or purchased at around 1915 by Andrew Johnson, an immigrant from Stockholm, Sweden who had landed in Montreal in 1883 with his wife and young son.  His jobs as a day labourer and then a night watchman took him and his growing family to several locations around Montreal, until they settled on this quiet residential street in the suburbs.

Andrew's second-youngest daughter Clara was married in 1923 to John William Mayo, himself an immigrant from Manchester, England.  Soon after starting their own family, they bought the house from her father in 1928, and it has remained in the Mayo name since.

Originally the building was a single-story house, but in the early 1930s a second floor was added in order to accommodate the increasing needs of the family.  A long-running story claims that enough wood was used in the construction to build two similar houses.  In the mid 1960s the house was divided into two apartments, upstairs and downstairs.

As with many present-day families, the current generation of Mayo children who grew up on Prefontaine Street now have their own homes and lives.  The old homestead is in need of a great deal of restoration, but sadly there isn't the money to do it.  As of this writing the house has been put on the market, and it's likely that a new owner will decide that instead of fixing it, it would be cheaper to tear the house down and build new.

The home that sheltered four generations might soon be destroyed but it will not be forgotten.

Here's an article about the history of Montreal South.

Past Lives: Waterside

Times change, and when faced with adversity or dwindling communities, rural dwellers frequently move to more urban areas and leave their homes, schools, and churches behind.  Eventually most abandoned buildings fall prey to vandals and nature.

Waterside is a tiny community of farms and cottages on the shore of the Bay of Fundy in Harvey Parish, Albert County, New Brunswick.  First settled in 1805, by 1898 Waterside was a farming community with one store, three sawmills, one church and a population of 255.  Major landowners included families by the names of Anderson, Ackerley, Chandler, Downey, and Copp.

On present-day County Road 915 is the Waterside United Baptist Church Cemetery.  The original building was constructed in 1854 as the Baptist Meeting House of Roshea.  Later the United Baptist Church was built on the site in 1899 and dedicated in 1900 with a membership of 154.  In January of 2012, the church was struck by lightning and burned to the ground.  Its foundations are still visible but it's unknown as to whether it will be rebuilt.

A short way down the road is the boarded-up Waterside School.  At one time it served the communities of Waterside, Little Rocher, Anderson's Hollow, Roshea, and Dennis Beach.  However as the "consolidation" movement gained momentum and enrolment declined due to families moving out of the area, many rural schools were closed.  Waterside School closed its doors in 1967 and students now attend Riverside Consolidated School in the town of Riverside-Albert.

The area is now sparsely populated with fewer than 100 people but is known for its local wineries, scenic beaches, and the Cape Enrage Nature Preserve.

Photo courtesy of Phyllis and Melven Dewolfe, circa 2010

It's Who You Know

My father's stories of his youth in the small city of Cornwall Ontario had an undercurrent of his parents' savvy in how they dealt with people.  His mother was able to get him into a French school when normally it was against the rules, because she knew someone at the school board.  And she also got him a job working as a machinist for the company that built the Saint Lawrence Seaway in the mid-1950s.

Due to a shortage of trained workers, men were brought in from elsewhere and they stayed on site or at the homes of many local folks.  One of the men who boarded with my grandparents was Peter Gauthier, who ended up being Dad's boss on the job as well as a good friend.

Early in the construction phase, a large building was erected near the Moses-Saunders dam site for storage and maintenance of machinery, as well as the fabrication of steel rebar supports.  Dad was a member of a group who were responsible for measuring and threading the rebar supports to order.  He worked at this for one and a half years until construction was completed.

Afterwards Dad's father found him a job at the Cortaulds chemical plant where he worked, to do quality testing on cellophane at a new facility next door.  In this job there were four teams that worked six-hour rotating shifts: three on, one off.  The shift schedule wreaked havoc with a young man's social life - he was unable to pursue much of a relationship or hang out with his friends.  So after less than a year Dad decided to quit and join the Royal Canadian Air Force with hopes of becoming a pilot which would provide him a steady job and income.

For almost two years he trained on various aircraft at Centralia Ontario, Moose Jaw Saskatchewan, and Gimli Manitoba.  One summer he had some leave time, and offered to drive home with one of his fellow students who was Dutch and wanted to see some of Canada.  The man found it hard to believe that it would take three days to drive from Moose Jaw to Cornwall, but Dad gave him a tour that he wouldn't soon forget.

Despite Dad's best efforts he failed an advanced flying course on jets, which disqualified him from the pilots' program.  However he retained fond memories of the experience and later in his life he often spoke of the first plane he flew, which was a yellow DHC-1 Chipmunk.

After his stint in the Air Force he returned home to Cornwall and made plans to marry and settle down, but that is another story.

Rural Mysteries

This is not related to my family but I found it intriguing nonetheless.  Recently I came across a post in a New Brunswick genealogy forum by someone asking for help with a mystery.

The rural community of Pokiok - from the Maliseet "a narrow place" - is located on the west bank of the Saint John River in Dumfries Parish, 60 km west of Fredericton.  A stream of the same name empties into the Saint John nearby and was known for its waterfall and gorge before it was flooded as a result of construction of hydroelectric installations in the 1960s.

Approximately three kilometers west of Pokiok is the intersection of Allandale Road, which leads south past Brown Lake to the former farming settlement of Allandale that at the turn of the 20th century had a population of 125.  On the east side of the road is a little cemetery with only two visible stones.  The larger stone is relatively recent and reads:

Site of Saint Dominic's Catholic Church
circa 1864 - 1979
In Memory of the Souls Interred Here
May They Rest in Peace
Erected and Maintained by Woodstock Council #2234 K of C

The other stone is much older and reads:
IHS
In Loving Memory of Our Children
SIMMONS

Who were these people, and what happened to the site?

The only record concerning this site that seems to be available is a single mention in the New Brunswick Provincial Archives, where the cemetery is referred to as Saint Dominic's Catholic.  Despite exhaustive online seaching and attempts to contact the Catholic Diocese in New Brunswick I've been unable to find any other information on this now-defunct church.  If there were other stones here once, they are now missing or buried.

Archival maps and land grant indices show that there were four grants around Brown Lake to families with the name Simmons; most likely brothers.  According to census and burial records, they were Anglican of Scottish descent and many were buried in Barony which is 10 km away, so why would some be interred in a Catholic cemetery?

Possibilities include: 1. If they died from a communicable disease, burial would have to be swift to minimize the risk of passing the disease to others, and the Catholic cemetery was the closest burial ground available.  2. At that particular time the family was unable to travel the distance to Barony to bury their dead.  3. Some of the Simmons men married Catholic women, their children were christened in the Catholic church and so were eligible for burial in the Catholic cemetery.

Whatever the case, two stones and a few remote cottages are all that now remain of a community that housed families who were determined to make a living in the forests of New Brunswick. (Forests which, at the time of this writing, are in the process of being clear cut.)

Photo courtesy of Tim Scammell, 2016

The Almost-Forgotten Cemetery

On Route 105 in the community of White's Cove New Brunswick is a tiny cemetery, encompassing less than half an acre, that looks quite out of place in the surrounding fields.  I noticed it by accident the first time my brother was showing off his nearby cottage on Grand Lake, and decided to do some spur-of-the-moment exploration.  To my surprise I discovered the grave of a distant cousin, Isabelle June Sansom, and her husband Andrew Skead.

The cemetery itself is officially known as White's Cove United Church Cemetery in Cambridge Parish.  There was a church on the grounds once, but it was closed in 1967 along with several other area churches when the congregations were amalgamated.  The building was subsequently demolished and no trace remains.  The cemetery however has been lovingly maintained: grass mowed, flower displays on the graves, and such.

Isabelle June Sansom was the daughter of Theodore Sansom, an office worker, and his wife Dorothy Forbes.  Born in 1920 in Moncton, she with her family moved to Fredericton in about 1930, where she finished her education and became employed as a stenographer.  In 1947 she married Andrew William Skead, a game technician from Winnipeg.  This occupation had nothing to do with computers; rather, it was more like a game warden, where he saw to the health and protection of wildlife.

The two lived in Fredericton for many years and were longtime members of St. Paul's United Church in Fredericton.  They had four children.

Even after tracking down all this information I'm left wondering why they chose to be buried in such a small cemetery in cottage country.  Both her parents and her brother Reginald are buried in the larger St. John's Anglican Cemetery a few kilometers east.

However an essay in the June 17th 2013 edition of the Globe and Mail about her youngest brother Theodore mentions an "annual gathering of the clan on White's Cove" and "memories of the cottage and seafood cooking on the shore abound".  After visiting my brother's cottage and being warmly welcomed by several of his neighbours, I realized: perhaps that's why.  Families and friends in rural neighbourhoods tend to be closer and happier.

So whoever maintains that cemetery must have roots in the area and hasn't forgotten.

*This is a re-post from the blog A Writer's Workbench which has been removed by the author.

A Father's Youth

"After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world." -- Philip Pullman

I really enjoy my father's stories.  Too many people don't think to listen to what their elders have to say until it's too late, and wonderful memories can be forgotten.

Dad grew up in Cornwall, Ontario: a small city of about 46,000 and one of the first incorporated communities in Upper Canada.  Until the late 1990s the main industries were cotton processing and paper manufacturing.  He and his parents lived on a dead-end street in the east end; their house was the only one on the street with a telephone because the previous owner of the house had been a company executive and could afford to install a phone.  The residents of the street had a mixture of French and English names: Rowe, Boisvenue, Marlowe.

One of the clearest things that Dad remembers about his early childhood was staying with his 17-year-old sister Joy.  When he was five, his elder brother Billy was dying of leukemia (there was no treatment then).  To enable his parents to better care for Billy, Dad went to stay with Joy at her house in Toronto and he attended Kindergarten there for most of the school year.  One of his favourite activities while in Toronto was buying a ticket for the streetcar and riding all around the city by himself - something unheard of today.  After his brother passed away he returned to Cornwall for the remainder of Kindergarten.

By then the Second World War had broken out and making a living became difficult for some.  Fortunately Dad's father had a good job at the Cortaulds chemical plant.  However Dad's uncle Alfred, who worked a farm in what is now Surrey, British Columbia, was having trouble getting help because all of the able young men were serving in the military.  Dad and his mother went to the farm for the summer, where they helped grow and harvest strawberries, beans, and various other crops.  One day they went to a local fair, where Alfred purchased as a present for Dad a tiny totem pole carved out of bone that was made by a Native American artisan.  That totem remains on Dad's bureau to this day.

My grandparents made a smart decision to enroll Dad in a French school for Grade One.  At the time, the laws governing education were still based upon those that had been set down in the BNA Act of 1867.  French-speaking people had been given many freedoms under the Act, but education was limited to Grades 1 to 12 only.  Plus French-speaking people were only permitted to attend French schools, and the English speakers could only attend English schools.  However, my grandmother happened to know someone high up in the French school - there was only one in Cornwall, known as College Classique and run by clergy - and arranged for him to go to the French school until Grade 8.  As a result he became perfectly bilingual.

The stories continue.

*This is a re-post from the original Cinquefoil Heritage blog on Blogster which has been removed by the author.