SAINT JOHN, THE CITY AND ITS POOR, 1783-1877 

T.W. Acheson 

     The American Revolution was over. Throughout the spring, summer and fall of 1783 a stream of British warships and transports sailed into the broad estuary at the mouth of the Saint John River in His Majesty's Province of Nova Scotia and landed some 10,000 Loyalist refugees on its shores. The newcomers found a superb harbour in an estuary formed by two peninsulas jutting, at right angles to each other, into the Bay of Fundy. Well before the arrival of the Loyalists, British administrators had assumed that the peninsulas which formed Saint John harbour would become significant settlements. Military surveyors had accordingly laid out both as town sites, each consisting of a town plot and a series of squares or commons to serve as public parks. A small settlement called Carleton developed on the western peninsula, but the centre of Loyalist activity was at Parrtown on the eastern side of the harbour. Parrtown, named after Governor Thomas Parr of Nova Scotia, was located on high rocky ground, barren and unbroken except for two coves which provided easy access to the harbour. It was around these coves that the first Loyalist settlements were made, and before too many years had passed, the gradual expansion of population resulted in settlement of the areas between the coves.

     While the population of Parrtown may have reached 10,000 or more in the winter of 1783-84, it rapidly declined the following year as most refugees were resettled on the lush interval lands of the interior Saint John River valley. Aside from its harbour and fishing, Parrtown held few attractions for settlement. It was separated from its fertile hinterland by a network of high rocky hills and marshland, and the town itself was located on uneven rocky ledges.

Origins of the City and Incorporation 

      Who, then, stayed in the town, and why did they stay? About 500 adult men were made freemen of the City of Saint John in 1785. Most of them were Loyalists from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. The five largest occupational groups among them were farmers (82), carpenters (74), shoemakers (43), gentlemen and lawyers (43), and merchants (43). They stayed because of the port facilities and the good harbour and because location in a commercial centre would bring a certain degree of influence. Parrtown was not only the entry to a major river valley, it was also the entrance to most of the interior of what was to become New Brunswick. The Saint John River has as its tributaries the Kennebecasis, the Washademoak, the Oromocto, the Nashwaak, the Keswick, the Aroostook and the Tobique rivers, as well as many smaller rivers and the Grand Lake system. It was generally recognized that the community would soon become the commercial centre for this entire region as well as a major port for the British West Indies trade. In addition Saint John became a garrison city, with British regular soldiers stationed there.

     In 1784, at the demand of many Loyalist leaders, the province of New Brunswick was separated from Nova Scotia, and Colonel Thomas Carleton was made governor. To overcome the problem of maintaining order in the heavily populated towns at the Saint John River, Governor Carleton united them in 1785, and by securing issuance of a royal charter, created the City and Corporation of Saint John, the first incorporated city in British North America. The new city Common Council was composed of a mayor, six aldermen and six assistant aldermen. The mayor was appointed by the governor-in-council, but the other members of the council were elected annually by the freemen (inhabitants who were citizens and could vote) in each of the city's six wards. To vote or to operate a business or practise a trade or profession in the city, a man had to be a  freeman, a status designed to restrict control of the city to its most responsible people. The Common Council was given authority to regulate economic activity within the city. For example, it could set the price of food, control the use of the harbour, and determine who could buy and sell any goods or services. It made laws governing the conduct of all citizens, enforced those laws by whatever means necessary, and sat as a court of common pleas.

     The principal role of the city in its early years was to serve the commercial needs of the communities along the Saint John River system. This period, however, was difficult. During the first two decades, the population in the area stagnated or even declined. In the city itself the population was similarly affected because many sought greater security on farms in the interior or gravitated to locations such as Boston or Niagara which seemed to offer greater opportunities. The only significant group of newcomers to arrive in the city during this early period consisted of a number of Scottish merchants, including John Black and Lauchlan Donaldson, who acquired control of the Saint John mast and spar industry which was important to British naval supremacy at this time.

Urban Growth and the Timber Trade 

     The period of decline ended in 1807 when the British government determined to acquire for itself a secure supply of timber in the face of the Napoleonic threat. Napoleon had tried to defeat Britain by cutting off all timber supplies from the continent of Europe. Timber was to the British navy what petroleum is to a modern air force; without it the navy would be helpless, and Britain would be at the mercy of the French who had by then conquered most of Europe. The British solution to this problem was to impose a high tariff on foreign timber, a tariff so high that merchants and shippers in Saint John and Québec found it profitable to harvest North America timber and ship it to the mother country. The Saint  John River system became one of the great timber-producing areas of North America, and the city of Saint John became the centre from which merchants directed the whole operation. As timber was a bulk cargo, an extensive shipbuilding industry developed in the city to provide the hundreds of large carriers needed to transport this heavy commodity across the Atlantic. After the defeat of Napoleon the tariffs remained in place and continued to encourage exploitation of the British North American forests.

     As a result of this activity, the city experienced rapid growth. From perhaps 4,000 in 1810, the population rose to 8,000 in 1824, 12,000 in 1834, and 20,000 in 1840. The built-up area of the city, which had been concentrated in the form of three or four storey buildings around the east side docks, expanded across the eastern peninsula to Courtenay Bay. The whole peninsula rapidly filled with family dwellings while many of the more prosperous families began to move out of the dock-side district and into the northeastern end of the peninsula, toward the mainland. By 1840 the old Parrtown peninsula was one of the most densely populated urban areas in British North America; 18,000 people lived in three-quarters of a square mile.

     Much of this population growth occurred as a result of natural increase, but an even more important factor was immigration. From the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the flow of British migrants, particularly those from Ireland, steadily swelled until it reached its climax in the famine migrations of the late 1840s. The reason was simple. The large ships involved in the timber trade crossed the Atlantic loaded with wood but usually returned half empty since the manufactured goods which they brought to Saint John required far less space than had the timber. Thus, most shipowners encouraged British emigrants to embark for Saint John. It was much cheaper, for example, to travel from Liverpool to Saint John than from Liverpool to Boston. Many of these arrivals moved through Saint John on their way to the interior of the province, and still more passed on to Boston or other parts of New England, an area which came to be known in the Maritimes as the "Boston states". Yet, over the years, a significant number of them remained in the city.

Social Conditions 

      For those who came as businessmen or professionals, life was not difficult in this new environment; for craftsmen or labourers the situation could be very different. The principal problem faced by the latter was simply finding steady employment. The city charter restricted the practice of crafts and trades in the city to those who were freemen. For anyone who had been born in the city and had served an apprenticeship with a master craftsman, freedom of the city could easily and cheaply be acquired. For those who had not fulfilled these requirements the freedom could be bought, but only at considerable expense. The only occupations permitted to people without a freedom were those of labourer and servant, and it was among these groups that the great majority of immigrants were to be found. Many immigrants arrived in the city in a state of great destitution; many were sick, crippled, aged, widowed or orphaned and most of these had to be cared for at public expense, usually from the day of their arrival. The extensive migration of the 1830s and 40s created a large group of "marginal" people who were either unable to work or who worked as labourers in seasonal occupations such as dock workers, scavengers or millmen. It was this group which constituted the major part of what might be described as the poor, and which was forced to live for at least part of the year on the public welfare system.

     This is not to suggest that poverty did not exist before 1815 or that Loyalists never became public charges. A formal welfare system had existed in Saint John from 1786, and an almshouse had been in operation from 1800. In times of economic depression the early almshouse had been well filled. But among the established Loyalist families the receipt of public welfare had been rare. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, the Loyalists had occupied the most crucial areas of employment, tradesmen, farmers, salmon fishermen, shopkeepers, and shipwrights for example, and only during the worst depressions was their livelihood seriously threatened. Secondly, the members of many older families intermarried to the point where most had a large number of relatives in the community, and there was, apparently, a widespread tradition of extended families caring for their less fortunate members in time of need. Indeed, by the 1830s, if an established member of the community encountered severe financial difficulty he was much more likely to end up in the debtor's prison than in the almshouse treatment commensurate with his social position.

     The early welfare system was quite simple. The Council of New Brunswick (the Executive Council after 1833) annually appointed three Overseers of the Poor for each parish who were responsible for the poor and deprived within their district. These volunteer, amateur administrators personally dealt with each applicant for relief, purchased supplies for their use and organized the facilities of the community to meet each unusual problem as it arose. There were two basic methods for dealing with the indigent. The permanently dispossessed. such as the crippled, aged, widowed and orphaned, were kept in the almshouse one for whites and one for blacks along with able-bodied men who possessed no property. Those with families who possessed some form of shelter were assisted by "outdoor relief" by which they were provided with a small, weekly allowance and were permitted to remain in their own lodgings. Since the entire cost of welfare had to be borne by a special tax imposed directly on all the householders and income earners in the city, the overseers were quick to place able-bodied welfare recipients in any available employment. It was this personal involvement and intimate knowledge of the recipient, the community, and virtually all employment opportunities that characterized the early welfare system and the work of its overseers.

     In a prosperous year these public and private organizations could provide for a large number of poor. Unfortunately the timber economy of Saint John was not without liability. On the one hand, it made a number of merchants very wealthy and provided marginal living for a large number of seasonal labourers in the city; on the other hand, much of this labour force lived on public welfare for at least part of each year. During the frequent depressions in the timber trade which occurred about every four or five years between 1815 and 1846, the combination of incoming immigrants and prolonged unemployment among the city labourers led to frequent breakdowns of the welfare system. Occasionally the impact of such a depression affected many of the city's tradesmen. Such a situation occurred in the summer and fall of 1841. As the long, cold Saint John winter set in there was no relief in sight. Thousands of families were faced with great privation, some with actual starvation. A desperate Common Council turned to the provincial authorities who lent $5,000 to the city. This was used by the overseers of the poor, the road masters and the commissioners of highways to provide a winter-long public works programme which employed hundreds of labourers in cutting streets through the solid rock foundations of the east side.

The Crisis of Poverty 

     The immigrant influx of the 1820s and 30s placed a severe strain on the welfare system. The Irish migration, in particular, contained an unusually large proportion of paupers and unemployables. While it was true that the provincial government would pay the welfare costs incurred by newly-arrived immigrants, this in no way provided either for the permanent paupers who became a fixed charge on the city or for the large numbers of seasonal labourers who were regarded as immigrants only during the year of their arrival. Moreover, most immigrants were inspired to come to Saint John by circumstances in their homeland rather than the economic prospects afforded by the city. For example, in 1842 the city was inundated with thousands of hungry Irish peasants at a time of great economic distress when hundreds of city workingmen were already unemployed.

     Indeed, it could be argued that if membership in the British Empire was in large measure responsible for the prosperity of Saint John, the British connection was also the source of most of the city's major problems of poverty and welfare. Regulation of immigration by the city or the colony was impossible because as British subjects, the Irish migrants had the right of unhindered entry into any British port. By the same token, the other principal groups of welfare recipients, military dependents and blacks, were essentially products of imperial ties. Virtually every year, numbers of discharged soldiers or soldiers' dependents became public charges for one reason or another. As for the black population, most of it was made up of refugees from the United States whom the British government had settled near Saint John following the War of 1812.

     The first response to the growing problem of poverty was the development of a number of national, voluntary aid societies: St. Patrick's for the Irish, St. George's and Albion for the English, and St. Andrew's for the Scots. In addition, during the 1820s most city churches began to provide a variety of welfare services ranging from missionary-social workers to outright gifts of money to serving societies. In the 1830s the Female House of Industry for unemployed and destitute females was organized by private subscription. As the pressure of immigrant paupers increased in the 1830s, it became necessary to create permanent publicly-supported welfare institutions to cope with the problem. The first of these were the smallpox hospital and the provincial asylum, both of which were established in 1837, the latter to house the growing number of destitute mental patients, four-fifths of whom were immigrants. These institutions were followed, in 1840, by the creation of the immigrant hospital and the provincial penitentiary, the latter designed to cope with the rising incidence of crime committed by the destitute Irish population.

     By the 1840s the cost of such welfare programmes was becoming prohibitive. Much of the established citizenry blamed the continued influx of poor Irish migrants for most of the problems, and a number of petitions from the city were sent to the imperial authorities urging that immigration be more carefully controlled and that British landlords and public officials not be permitted to use the colonies as a dumping ground for charity cases. These appeals were to no avail. The effect of the petitions was weakened by the fact that the city's leading timber merchants opposed any restriction which could hinder their right to bring fee-paying passengers back from Ireland.

     To further compound the problem, the British government decided, in the mid-1840s, to dismantle the imperial economic system around which the commerce of Saint John had been structured for nearly forty years. The decision seriously damaged both the port's timber trade and its shipping industry. The preference given colonial timber on the British market was gradually abolished, as was the demand that goods from the West Indies and British North America destined for the United Kingdom be carried in British ships. Baltic timber and American ships partly replaced those of Saint John in the British market, and the merchants of Saint John were thrown into despair. Hundreds of businessmen were driven into bankruptcy; there was even talk in the city of annexation to the United States as the only way to save the community from complete disaster.The less secure classes of society suffered even more than did the merchants; hundreds of tradesmen, craftsmen and workshop employees were reduced to poverty. Many of them ended up on outdoor relief throughout much of the 1840s, and many others departed for Boston or for rural settlements in the interior of New Brunswick.

     The places of those who left Saint John were taken by incoming immigrants. These people settled as near as possible to the port facilities. Their principal settlement was a small ghetto in the northwestern part of Kings Ward called York Point. Here hundreds of day labourers and their families made a life for themselves in the congested tenement buildings in which a few rooms could be obtained cheaply. Lacking any water or sewage facilities, the inhabitants of these buildings obtained their water from public pumps and, under the cover of darkness, emptied their garbage and human wastes into the streets. At the same time, the business and professional people who lived in the dockside areas of Kings and Queens Ward gradually began to move into the more recently settled areas of eastern Kings Ward (later known as Prince and Wellington Wards) and, finally, beyond the city into Portland Heights. Some of the immigrant labourers arriving in mid-century became part of a permanent, large group of working poor. This body of disadvantaged remained an enduring feature of Saint John society for the rest of the colonial period.

Prosperity and Recession 

     A ready source of cheap labour proved to be useful when a measure of prosperity returned to the city in the 1850s. This was the "golden age" of the shipbuilding industry, and the city's poor were needed to provide the labour necessary to maintain the commerce and services required by the city's growing hinterland. Throughout the early nineteenth century, most people had been employed in the staples trade and shipping as dock workers, shipbuilders, pilots, sailors and fishermen, whose produce was intended for the export markets in Great Britain, the West Indies or even the United States. A smaller but, nonetheless, important group were the craftsmen and labourers who produced goods for the domestic market and the doctors and other professionals and small businessmen who ministered to their needs. The service tradesmen and professionals steadily grew in numbers as the population of the city's hinterland expanded.

     This hinterland comprised most of the communities within a hundred mile radius of Saint John, including the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. Saint John merchants and banks controlled and supported much of the business activity in the hinterland; Saint John newspapers were read there, and regular transportation facilities connected out-lying communities with the city. By 1850 Saint John was linked with its tributary centres by a network of steamers and stage coaches. These were: Gagetown, Fredericton, Woodstock and Madawaska on the Saint John River; Bend of the Petitcodiac (Moncton) and Sackville to the east; Digby and the Annapolis Valley on the south; and St. Andrews and the Passamoquoddy communities on the west. As settlement of these hinterland communities continued, they played an increasingly important role in the economic life of the city. The population of the most important of them, the Saint John River Valley, increased from 40,000 in 1824 to 140,000 in 1861.

     There were some serious difficulties in developing and maintaining these hinterland markets. The influence of the Saint John merchant was limited to those areas directly accessible to his ships. The Bay of Fundy was virtually a Saint John lake, but the communities on the Northumberland Strait towns like Shediac, Richibucto, Chatham, Newcastle, Bathurst and Campbellton had little connection with the New Brunswick metropolis. Another problem, which grew more serious as the population of the upper Saint John River Valley expanded, was the difficulty of river navigation above Fredericton. The cost per ton-mile from Fredericton to Woodstock was twice that of the Saint John to Fredericton run, while above Woodstock transportation costs multiplied as much as eightfold. By 1850 many saw the solution to these problems, and to problems of the lack of permanent work in Saint John itself, in the new railway technology. The most popular plan was one which had two railways lines running from the city, one to Madawaska (Edmunston) up the valley, and the other to Shediac in an effort to give Saint John merchants an opening on the Northumberland Strait. Work was begun on the latter railway, called the European and North American Railway, in the 1850s, and it was completed in 1860.

     Many Saint John labourers also found employment in the city's manufacturing industries. By far the most important of these was the sawmill industry. Originally, most New Brunswick wood was shipped to Great Britain in the form of squared timber. During the 1840s this situation changed and timber was cut into long, thick, wide boards called deals. As well, the growing domestic markets stimulated the development of a number of industries to supply the basic needs of the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia settlements. During the 1850s and 60s dozens of new enterprises were developed and expanded. Hundreds of men were employed in flour mills, iron foundries, tanneries and boot, shoe and nail factories, while hundreds of women went to work in the cotton mill and in the ready made clothing industry. By 1870 Saint John was not only the fourth largest urban centre in Canada, exceeded only by Montréal, Québec City, and Toronto, but the value of the goods produced by its workers probably rivalled the output of Québec City and Toronto. Unlike either of those cities, Saint John had no government establishment and no great centre of education; it was a city of commerce and industry. The people of Saint John were, for the most part, workers, and the city's prosperity depended upon the quality of its workers and its business community.

     In the mid-1870s Saint John, like most cities in the new Dominion, was engulfed in a prolonged depression which saw a major decline in the British demand for Canadian lumber and ships. It was, in fact, the beginning of the end for the city's great shipbuilding industry, an industry which had at one time produced 100 ships a year. The effects of the depression were aggravated by the consequences of a disastrous fire which broke out near the central business district and, assisted by high winds, destroyed more than 1,600 buildings and reduced most of the early nineteenth-century city to ashes. The great fire was symbolic of the passing of an age. In its wake the city was physically rebuilt, but the economy was not as easily restored to health. Saint John entered a period of adversity, faced with the arduous task of discovering a wellspring from which new prosperity would flow.