Item
The Black Population
It's August 26th, 1948. A man lies unconscious on the Algonquin golf course, the victim of a heart attack. He hadn't been golfing. He is dressed in a labourer's clothes; his team and delivery wagon stand nearby. After they return home without him, a search is made and John Cadman Norris is rushed to Charlotte County Hospital where he dies the next day. The town commemorates the death of one of its most loved citizens with its largest funeral to date.
Norris was black, the last visible descendant of slaves and servants who arrived with the founding of St. Andrews by the Penobscot Loyalists in 1783. That isn't mentioned at his funeral, where he is remembered simply as an exceptionally kind and generous person, but was perhaps a factor in the collective love and pity felt for this man. We wonder today, as perhaps his mourners wondered then, why the blacks of St. Andrews are no more - why only fragments remain: a few gravestones, the legend of black shantytown, second-hand accounts of a black painter who made a name for himself in New England, a slave named Black Violet, a brother and sister hanged for murder. The blacks of St. Andrews were, almost without exception, landless, illiterate and poor. As such, they didn't leave many records, in either paper or stone. Nevertheless, with a little digging through church and land records and other material, at least part of their story can be recovered. It is a very fragmentary story to be sure, but much more than a bare-bones genealogy. It is at least part of the story they would have told themselves, if they had had the opportunity.
The earliest record of a black population appears in the "Return of Men, Women and Children of the Penobscot Loyalists Settled in the District of Passamaquoddy the 10th of June 1784," Ward Chipman Papers, Muster Master General's Office - Loyalists Musters, 1776-1785. There we have seven men and one child under ten listed as "negro." Their names are: Sampson Strong ["Negro"], Reuben Strong ["Negro"], Boston Steel ["Negro"], Sampson Fogs ["Negro"], Wm. Troop ["Negro"], Samuel [no last name, "Negro"], Cato [no last name, "Negro"], and James /A Negro/ [child under 10 – no parentage given]. The man named Cato appears also in the "Return of Men Women and Children's Names with Lieut. Colonel Stewart Settled in the District of Passamaquoddy, 1784." Here Cato has the surname "Stewart" and is married to Hannah Stewart. There are other Stewarts in this list but it is not known if they were black or white. We will meet up with black Stewarts later on in this narrative.
Most of the rest of what we know about the early history of black St. Andrews is confined to the daybook of Reverend Samuel Andrews, the Church's first rector. In chronological order then, we have in 1788 two adult negroes by the name of Charles and Joseph christened. (The Joseph referred to here may have been "Old Joe," a black man who lived at the head of town and made splendid spruce beer. That is how he was remembered by Melville Jack in 1912 through a story told to him by his father. In 1795 two black children of Charles are christened.) A son of Charles, a negro, is christened in 1800. And then there is Black Jeffery. Reverend Andrews makes a number of references to this mysterious individual. Between 1804 and 1813 six of his children are christened. His last name is never mentioned, nor the name of his wife, and only two children are even mentioned by name. One is Jeffery Junior, baptized in 1805, and a daughter Hannah, in 1809. Hannah, suggestive of the Hannah and Cato Stewart marriage, above, will appear later in this narrative.
All Saints marriage and burial records, beginning to be more systematically recorded in 1816, supply a few names to this otherwise rather anonymous record. There are actually quite a few deaths of black persons mentioned, but Reverend Andrews and his successor Jerome Alley weren't in the habit of giving much detail, either for black or white, so often we have only a first name or sometimes not even that. Matthew Moses, a black man, is buried 1816. A girl of color by the name of Stewart is buried 1820, age 16. Phyllis, a woman of color, is buried in 1820. Yet another woman of color, no name given, is buried 1825. There is one marriage mentioned which bears on the rest of this story. In 1816 David Ross marries Ann Simmonds. We know from cross-referencing of later records that Mr. Ross is a black barber from Bermuda. He and Ann have two daughters born to them - Martha in 1819, who dies in 1821; and Elizabeth or Betsy, born in 1821. Mr. Ross is widowed around 1835. In 1859 a terrible accident occurs. The barbershop he operates on Water Street with Theodore Bounds, a black barber from New Jersey, is burned down and Betsy suffers brain damage. She is mentioned in the 1861 census as "simple - caused by fire." Poor House records show that in 1861 father and daughter are living in the St. Andrews Poor House and are still there in 1872 when they die within a few months of each other.
Another early black marriage is that of Joseph Brush to Julia Mires in 1816. The witness is a man by the name of Rueben Alexander. Mr. Alexander is the first black person of St. Andrews of whom anything like a family record can be constructed. Local writer Grace Helen Mowat, whose Diverting History of a Loyalist Town (1932) is the town's first history of any note, mentions a certain Black Violet, a slave who came to St. Andrews with Captain Christopher Hatch, was an excellent cook, and also a source of much information about life in Revolutionary times. Around the same time as Mowat published her book, local artist Frances Wren created a pictorial history of the town which can still be seen in private homes, in one panel of which there appears an unfortunately stereotypical depiction of Black Violet herself. The caption states that Black Violet could remember as a little girl the day the slave ship came to take her away from her African village.
From church records we know that Black Violet was actually Violet Tucker, and that if she came to New Brunswick with Christopher Hatch, a captain in the British Army, she probably came to St. Andrews in 1788. That is the date Hatch sold his house in Germaine Street, Saint John. Reverend Andrews notes in his daybook for 1792 the simultaneous baptism and marriage of Violet Tucker and Rueben Alexander. In 1799 Mr. Alexander purchased an inexpensive lot near Indian Point on the site of the present day New Brunswick Community College for one pound six pence. Slavery was still very much an institution in New Brunswick at this time. The Royal Gazette contains not a few notices of slaves for sale, and even more notices of runaway slaves, though the inevitable caveat about transporting, harbouring or employing them may indicate that attitudes are softening. In 1800, in a celebrated case before the New Brunswick Supreme Court, a jury is unable to decide whether or not a slave has the right to freedom. That Violet and Rueben were able to purchase land together indicates that they were not slaves, though they may have been servants, either indentured or free. Or they may have been free, pure and simple.
Already by 1799 Violet and Rueben had children. Mary and Henrietta were christened in 1793 and 1797, respectively. In 1799 a son, Horatio Nelson Alexander was christened. Nelson had achieved a stunning victory over Napoleon's navy off the coast of Egypt the previous year. (Local coroner David Mowat named a son by the same name later in that year.) There were many other children which followed these first three. Between 1801 and 1810 James, Andrew, Kesiah and Abigail were christened, and there may have been others as well. What happened to these children is completely unknown to this writer. It is only by the survival of Reverend Andrews' little daybook that even these individuals are remembered. It is also possible that Rueben had a brother, for later records mark the death of a black man by the name of Robert Alexander and his son William in 1819. Probably either Robert or Rueben had a son Joseph as well, for the 1851 census shows Violet Alexander living with a black family headed up by Joseph Alexander, with his wife and children. Violet dies the next year, aged 96.
Certainly the Alexanders were a black family of some number in early St. Andrews, and were probably here from its inception. The other early family is the Stewart line, already mentioned. In 1826 there occurred an event which brings the Stewart line to the forefront. It was the execution on 29th of August, 1826 of a black brother and sister, Richard and Maria Stewart, for the murder of their newborn child. The Royal Gazette reported this execution as only the second since the founding of the town. They were arraigned on July 27th, and on August 16th, Judge Ward Chipman Jr., Justice of the Supreme Court of New Brunswick, delivered the verdict of death by hanging. The case was doubly pathetic in that Maria's daughter Margaret was a material witness against her mother. Her curiosity piqued by having been sent to bed at an unusually early hour, she witnessed the strangulation of the newborn by Richard through a gap in the curtain. "We hope most sincerely," concluded the Gazette, "that this awful example will act as a warning to others in this vicinity, who, there is too much reason to believe, although not guilty, as in the present case of incest, yet are strongly suspected of having taken away the lives of their own children, the fruits of their illicit amours." The hanging took place between 10:00 am and 2:00 pm at the courthouse and jail, which was located at town center, the site of the present-day town hall. The bodies were buried in the southeast corner of the present day Loyalist cemetery, the church having convened a special meeting that morning to decide where to bury the homicides, and measured off a square eight by twelve feet to be used for these two individuals and any after them who should receive the full sentence of the law. The All Saints burial record concluded the event with chilling brevity: "August 30, 1826, Richard and Maria Stewart, convicts, executed for murder."
Who were these unfortunates? We don't know their ages or relations, but it seems more than probable that their parents either arrived with the Loyalists or were first generation children. There are a number of Stewarts mentioned in the Anglican church records. There is the burial, already mentioned, of a certain Stewart "girl of colour" in March of 1820, aged 16. Susan Stewart, woman of colour, was buried three years after the hanging, in December 13, 1829, aged 56; also a black boy named Charles Stewart in the same year, aged 1 year 9 months. A Margaret Stewart, "girl of colour," perhaps the daughter of Maria Stewart, was buried on November 23, 1832, aged sixteen. A certain Charles Stewart, aged 70 but color unknown, died in 1829. There are other Stewarts mentioned as well, not specifically identified by race, and it seems almost inconceivable that some of them were not related to Richard and Maria, but in what capacity may never be known.
The Alexander and Stewart families intermarried. The story of St. Andrews' blacks is the story of a fairly closely knit community, genealogically speaking. There are only about six families, and the Stewart-Alexander connection is perhaps the most prolific. It was on January 1, 1827, for example, that Edward Bannister and Hannah Alexander were joined in matrimony. Bannister was a mariner and was unusual for a black man in that he does not seem to have been illiterate. In an age when illiteracy among both whites and blacks was very common, no X adorns his marriage certificate. It is unknown who Hannah Alexander was, though she may well have been the unnamed daughter of the aforementioned Black Jeffery. Edward Bannister was buried only five years later, aged 49, after fathering two sons - Edward and William Henry. We have a record for William Henry only, dated 1830. The older brother, Edward Junior, very surprisingly for a black man, went on to become a New England painter of note. Bannister shipped out of St. Andrews at a young age, probably in his teens, and made his way to Boston, where he worked for a time as a barber, photographer and painter before winding up in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1876 his "Under the Oaks" won a gold medal at the Centennial in Philadelphia, and Bannister went on to become one of the most popular painters of his day. He was an excellent romantic painter of his generation, and is regarded today as one of nineteenth-century America's better painters, certainly one of its best black painters. Not very many Americans or New Brunswickers knew that he hailed from an impoverished black community in St. Andrews.
We might pause for a moment to consider what it was like to be a black person in mid-nineteenth century St. Andrews. Only second-hand accounts of Bannister's early life are available. A rather romantic version appeared in the New York Sun in 1896, and was excerpted in the St. Andrews Beacon. "So thoroughly free from race prejudice were the inhabitants," wrote Thomas Fortune, a black journalist, "that 'colored' was rarely heard among them." It was not until Bannister arrived in Boston, apparently, that he was first made aware of the critical distinction between black and white. Given the many references in the Anglican records to Black Jeffery, Black Rueben, Black Mary and more, this seems a slight exaggeration, though other rural American blacks from the nineteenth century have also remembered not having realized that they were "colored" until they arrived in the big cities.
A few instances from the local papers tell a somewhat different story. In a piece that passed for humour in the Standard of 1842, "Two gay companions driving towards the pretty little town of - - - on a fine morning a few days ago espied a well dressed female walking some little distance before them on the road. One of them, (who we shall call X) says to the other, "I know that person well, she is a d - d fine girl - I am very intimate with her." "Who is she? Who is she?" inquired his friend Y, just as they were about overtaking the lady in question; who, looking round at the moment, discovered an African countenance of the deepest hue! X's laugh was in no way measured - while Y, exclaimed, 'Laugh, d - n you, laugh will you?' And many a good laugh had X at his friend, and his supposed intimacy with the lady of colour."
Another involved a public dispute, reproduced in the Standard, between James McLaughlin, the editor of the short-lived Charlotte Gazette and local M.P. James K. Boyd in 1849. Mr. McLachan lived just outside of town on the site of the Rossmount Inn. He also lived with a black woman, whom Boyd styled variously as McLachlan's "sable Duncinea" and "sooty satellite," epithets which evidently passed for humour at the time. McLachlan, in these diatribes, was alternately either "black Jack" or "the Ethiopian Editor."
A story illustrating or not illustrating racism in St. Andrews, depending on your point of view, appeared in the local newspaper in May 1848, about the time that Bannister shipped out of St. Andrews. A certain black Eastport barber by the name of Crawford had been in St. Andrews cutting hair at a local hotel. By noon he was hungry but his "delicacy" prevented him from asking for a seat at the common table. When he requested a luncheon, he received only the gaping stare of some dirty servants and no meal. This is the barber's account, which he reported to the editor of the Eastport Sentinel. "What we once heard of a runaway slave is strictly true," responded the Sentinel, "that people at the north need not fear to be overrun by the blacks in case they should be emancipated by the South, for the cold weather would half kill them, and prejudice would half kill them, and so two halves make a whole. Refuse brother man a dinner merely because he is black? O, free and equal Bluenosedom! Tell it not in Gath! Mr. Crawford is a man we should be happy at any time to have seated with us at our table."
A local witness to the event told a rather different tale to the St. Andrews Standard, one in which Mr. Crawford's meal was merely delayed in coming, and arrived to find that the barber had already left. "Your brother editor of the Sentinel, in his notice," wrote the witness, "has cast a reflection upon the whole inhabitants, based upon Crawford's false report; perhaps he may yet find out - that the Bluenoses are truly free, and that they hail every honest man be he ever so dark skinned, as a brother. We have neither slaves nor slaveholders amongst us, nor are we living in slavish fear."
The jury will be forever out on this case but given the fact that of all the blacks so far mentioned only Rueben Alexander owned land, and a very poor piece of land at that, that blacks in St. Andrews worked almost without exception as either labourers and servants, and were as a group almost uniformly landless and illiterate - makes the idea of raceless confraternity in St. Andrews seem a bit far-fetched. It might be noted, though perhaps it is not significant, that Edward Bannister never returned to St. Andrews. He sometimes sailed his sloop as far north as Mount Desert Island to paint and sketch, but there is no mention of his having ever returned to his birthplace.
It isn't until the first provincial census of 1851 that we get a fairly detailed picture of black St. Andrews. At four thousand inhabitants the town is the largest in Charlotte County, and also has the largest black population at about 50 souls. The nearest competitors are St. Patrick Parish with three, and St. George with one. Blacks who live in town are mostly boarders and servants. Clarissay Richardson, widow, lives in the St. Andrews Poor House with her daughter Margaret, granddaughter Ann, and 31 other persons, mostly Irish labourers and their families, along with three other widows. This trio can be found there year after year in the Poor House records; they were permanent residents. Phebe Brickson, 22, servant, boards with William McStay, Irish physician, his wife and their seven children. Mary Banks, 35, lives as servant with David Jack, Dept. Treasurer, his wife and their four children. Eliza Stewart, 34, servant, lives with R. D. James, farmer, his wife and two children, and two Irish servants. Francis Riggs, shoemaker, his wife and son live with George Hume, wife and seven children. Ellen Stuart, 21 (in all probability black, though described as native), lives as servant with Harris Hatch and wife. There are a few exceptions to the boarder-servant rule. Charles Platt, mariner, lives in what is described as a "frame shanty" with his wife and daughter. Abram Lodge, millman, lives outside of town in Chamcook with wife and seven children. In 1855 Lodge will purchase 12 acres of shorefront property there, which he will eventually will to his daughter Sarah.
So it is a mixture - mostly poor, mostly servants, mostly boarders, but with a few exceptions. And then there is Slabtown. There is a legend in St. Andrews that there used to be a small black shantytown along Cedar Lane called Slabtown, and that the corner of Cedar Lane and Reid Avenue was known as "Nigger Corner." Just about all the blacks in this census are clustered in three pages of the census, and we know from cross referencing with land records that some of these families leased farmland along Cedar Lane in what was then called the Western Commons. It is difficult to know where Slabtown begins and ends because the people who live in this area are actually a mixture of black and white, but if we begin with "African" and end with "African" we have 42 blacks and mulattos. There are a few boarders. In a two-storey house Edward Brickson, mariner, and wife, and Phebe Carrey, spinster, board with 15 whites consisting mostly of two families. All the other blacks have separate dwellings. John Brooks, mariner, wife and adopted daughter occupy a shanty next door. Nearby is David Ross, barber, and his daughter Elizabeth in another shanty. A few houses down we have Charles Stewart, wife and four children in a frame one-storey. At the end of the lane we have Moses Stewart, farmer, in a log house with his wife Elizabeth, who is white or part white, and their four mulatto children. Moses is probably a brother of Charles and John Stewart, who live next door and are approximately the same age - about 45 to 50. It is even possible that Richard and Maria Stewart were siblings and once lived in this area; certainly, their ages are right. Joseph Alexander, mariner, lives next door to Moses in a cabin with his wife and five children. Finally we have John Stewart, again a farmer, in a frame shanty with his wife, three children and, as aforementioned, Violet Alexander, now a very old lady in the last year of her life.
A few things about Slabtown. This is a poor area. Slabs were the rounded outside parts of logs that were cut off in the squaring up of timber - refuse wood. No doubt the shanties mentioned in the census were made of such, and perhaps some of the other buildings as well. The heads of these households are farmers and labourers. It is a mixture of black and white. Some of these whites, usually Irish, are poor. The shanties are not confined specifically to the blacks. The Western Commons is municipal property, and cannot be owned, only leased, but none of the families dwelling here even lease this land. At this point in time it is held mostly by fairly substantial (hence white) property holders. The farmers and labourers mentioned here - both black and white - are probably the British equivalent of share-croppers, taking or sharing part of the crop in lieu of rent. It isn't the only slum part of town. Near Katy's Cove there is a shantytown of poor Irish imported in 1848 to work the railroad, which began the year before. Here, in living conditions which must have been bleak, there are about 400 persons in about 35 shacks.
It is unknown when Slabtown arose. It is not there on a map for 1813. Cedar Lane itself is not there and the area is still forest. Cedar Lane is there in 1829, but only two buildings show on the map - a barn belonging to James Parkinson, a well-to-do landowner, and William Boyd, who also owns a fair bit of property. On the other hand, the map was created to show new roads under construction, and shanties would not have merited much attention. By 1851 there are a fair number of buildings and people in this area, so either it grew quickly after 1829, or it was there in some form before. It might be remembered that Irish famine victims began arriving as early as 1817, and the adjacent Poor House farm was created in 1818 to help deal with the problem, so perhaps Slabtown began around this time as well. Before this the black population of St. Andrews must have lived in town or boarded with farmers in the outlying area, perhaps in outback shanties such as may perhaps have lined Cedar Lane. Also, by about 1820, William Spray estimates in his history of black New Brunswick, there was probably no actual slavery in the province, so blacks may have found in Slabtown an opportunity, however humble, to live with some degree of independence.
Back to Cedar Lane and Moses Stewart. As noted in the first of this essay, a Cato Stewart, settled with the retinue of Lieut. Col. Allan Stewart in 1784, was black. It is very likely that this person, about whom we know nothing else, was part of the lineage from which Moses Stewart, born in 1792, descended. From Moses, Elizabeth and their four children descend the greater part of the rest of the blacks of St. Andrews, right down to Cadman Norris. Moses' wife Elizabeth, born Smith, is of English extraction and arrived in New Brunswick in 1819. She and Moses were married late. The ceremony took place in St. Andrews in 1842, after all of their four children - George, Helen, Jessie and Almira - had been born. On the same day Helen and Jessie, who were in their teens by now, were baptized.
From this period on to the turn of the century, we actually know a fair bit about the Stewart line, at least compared to earlier records. In 1852, for example, Joseph Stewart makes a rare move for a black man and purchases land in town at the corner of Water and Harriet Street. As for the children and grandchildren of Moses and Elizabeth, we can see a pattern of emigration emerging as the black population of St. Andrews begins gradually to shrink. George, the eldest, married Eliza Cole. Eliza Cole was probably the daughter of Mary Bignall, who was the daughter of Jerry Cole, a slave who came to Gagetown in 1783 with the first Rector of the Anglican Church there, Reverend Clark. Ms. Bignall moved to St. Stephen with the Clarkes, and probably came to St. Andrews to be near her daughter. She died in the St. Andrews Poor House in 1897, age unknown but very old, reported the local paper.
George and Eliza had four children. The eldest was Margaret, born 1854. Margaret moved to Lewiston, Maine with the family she was working for about 1876, when she is in her early twenties. We know this because her granddaughter, Elaine Bragdon, paid a visit to St. Andrews in 2004 to investigate her ancestry. She generously left a picture of her grandmother, Margaret Kemp, aged 101 in 1856. She told local genealogist Shirley O'Neill that that her family was very poor, and that many moved to Maine when they came of age, adding intriguingly that some returned here later and some came back specifically to be buried. This seems to have been true of her aunt Almira Bounds (Stewart).
Certainly, poverty dogged the rest of the Stewart family. Take the case of Sam Cole. Technically, his surname was Stewart but was known unofficially, for some mysterious reason, as Sam Cole. Sam Cole was in St. Andrews in 1936, and former mayor Frederick Worrell told his sad story in one of his weekly "Shiretown Items" columns. Cole had left St. Andrews for Caribou, Maine, around 1891, but after the deaths of his wife and three children moved to New Waterford, Cape Breton, where he remained for 22 years. Now, wrote Worrell, at 78 unable to obtain work, he had gone to visit his son in Caribou but finding that his only remaining child could not afford to support him, he had come to St. Andrews, his birthplace, looking for relief. Unfortunately, the town could do no more for Mr. Stewart than to provide him with enough money to pay part of his way back to New Waterford. After this, Sam Cole disappears from the record.
Our third émigré is Almira Stewart, George's youngest sister. Almira married a black barber from New Jersey named Theodore Bounds, who seems to have teamed up with David Ross for a time. A child, Charlotte, was born to them in 1858. Then, as already mentioned, a fire destroyed Mr. Bounds' barber shop in 1859, along with a number of other businesses in what was then called the Church Block, later the Berry block, and the Bounds family moved to Houlton, Maine. We know this from a 1870 U. S. census, provided courtesy of Shirley O'Neill. Almira had died, probably in childbirth, in 1869. Mr. Bounds, still barbering, was living there then with his six children. Jessie Brickson, Almira's sister, was also there. Perhaps after her sister's death she moved to Houlton temporarily to help care for the children. Her occupation is given as housekeeper. Jessie came back to St. Andrews in the not-too-distant future, and perhaps brought with her Charlotte, the eldest of Theodore's children. She may have been there at the time of her brother George's death. He died at the Poor House adjacent to his home after a horrible accident reported in the local paper as "A Man Roasted Alive." An epileptic, he had fallen into the fire while repairing a horse collar and been burned almost to death. "The house in which Stewart lived in," reported the Standard, was "a mere hovel, presenting a scene of squalid misery, and not a proper place in which to take care of the man." As for Charlotte, we know from the Poor House Farm accounts that she and her infant Mira were residents at the St. Andrews Poor House for 1878 and 1879. Previously she had been living at the Poor House on Deer Island, which paid her expenses at the St. Andrews location.
It is not hard to understand why the blacks of St. Andrews were leaving. There was more work in New England, not just for blacks, but for Acadians and Irish and anyone else who needed employment. English Maritimers were moving to Boston and surrounding area to work the mills and woods. After the end of the Civil War in 1865, no doubt, many blacks went to New England to be reunited with relatives, or simply to be part of a larger black population. Also, as professor Spray wrote in his black history of the province, many blacks returned to the United States after the emancipation in 1861 because they felt they could better advocate for human rights there than in Canada "where they were legally given the same rights as whites but faced many types of discrimination."
Counterbalancing to some extent this emigration was the prolific family of Helen Stewart, sister of George and Almira. She married William Henderson, whom we first meet in the 1851 census as a resident of the St. Andrews Poor House. He is listed as Irish, though that does not necessarily mean he was white. They remain in St. Andrews, have a number of children, who in turn have many children. After the 1861 census identification by race becomes rare, and the Hendersons are hereafter simply "Irish." It is possible that if William Henderson was white or mulatto, and some of his children married into white families, by the time of the turn of the century this family may have appeared more or less white. In some instances, that seems to have been the case.
Slabtown itself disappeared in 1903, when a golf course took its place. Its end is bound up closely with Jessie Stewart, the last of the children of Moses and Elizabeth, and the transformation of St. Andrews into a tourist destination. Jessie had married Edward Brickson, a black mariner, probably as a fairly young woman. Her husband was older. His first wife Susan, daughter Hanna, son James and his sister Julia had all died in 1841; his son Edward Junior three years later. Edward and Jessie had a daughter Maria, born 1850. Moses had made a fairly significant step for a poor and illiterate black man in 1877 when he had leased lots 13 and 14 on the Western Commons in a seven-year lease at 12 dollars per year. This was just months after the death of his wife in January and the terrible death by burning of his son George in May. These were no doubt the same lots he had been farming all his life.
Moses transferred his lease to Jessie in 1881, to which his daughter put the inevitable X. In 1884 Jessie took out a $200 mortgage with the Bank of St. Andrews, and then, in 1888, the St. Andrews Land Company arrived in town. The Land Company, headed by New England businessmen connected mainly with railroad and steamship companies, was looking to create a new watering place north of the border, including a hotel, cottage development and golf course. The golf course would come later but first it was essential to secure the spacious farm properties at Joe's Point. Many of the farms surrounding Slabtown were quickly snapped up, and measures were taken to secure holdouts. One such seems to have been Jessie Brickson's small holdings. In 1888 the Bank of St. Andrews assigned its mortgage on her property to Henry Osburn for $253, and Osburn assigned it immediately to the St. Andrews Land Company for the same amount. Osburn was the former General Manager of the New Brunswick and Canada Railroad, operating out of St. Andrews. He was helping out Frank Cram, the present General Manager and one of the moving figures in the Land Company. Moses Stewart died the same year, aged 95.
Jessie was not above getting in on the speculation boom. In 1889 she leased one half of lot 11 on the Western Commons for $75 and transferred her deed to the Land Company in the same year for $500, a tidy sum. She doesn't seem to have wanted to sell her larger properties, however, and this may well have caused a headache for the Land Company, which by now owned just about all the land around her. In August of 1894 the local paper in an article titled "Was It Incendarism?" reported that Mrs. Brickson, the elderly colored widow living on the outskirts of town, had her barn go up in smoke. The next year the Land Company laid out its links at Joe's Point, just north of Cedar Lane. A schematic of this course for 1898 shows a distinctly small 18-hole course, with no hole more than 300 yards and about six holes crammed into the space north of Cedar Lane. By 1902, Jessie had come to a decision. For $400 she purchased lots 13 and 14. This is the total amount she would have had to pay on her lease to this point, and on the same day she deeded this land to the St. Andrews Land Company for one dollar. Doubtless, the Land Company had made her a deal where it would pay off her lease if she agreed to sell.
And that was the end of Slabtown. The next year it was announced that the C. P. R., under the management of Thomas Shaughnessy, had taken over the holdings of the St. Andrews Land Company, and one of the first things Shaughnessy did was to enlarge the golf course, including not only the old Brickson property but renting part of the Poor House Farm as well. One of the new holes for the new course is "Cedar Lane, 390 yards."
The end of Slabtown but not the end of St. Andrews blacks. Aside from the Hendersons, there were a few stragglers left in the form of the Norris family. Charles Norris was a former Maryland slave who was adopted by a Maine family, served as cook in various southern campaigns during the Civil War and eventually found his way to St. Andrews. He was remembered in an article in the Lewiston Evening Journal for 1905 as a big man who loved music and had a magnificent singing voice. He married Maria Norris, only child of Jessie Brickson, in Portland in 1872. Their two eldest children Helen (1873) and Jessie (1875) were born in Portland. The others, Charles Edward (1879), Clifford (1882), Kathleen (1887) and John Cadman (1890) were born in St. Andrews. A photograph of Algonquin hotel staff for 1896 shows several black persons and illustrates an interesting contrast. The two black chefs in the rear are from Boston, and the one to the left is George Braxton, a published author. His book, Braxton's Practical Cookbook, had appeared in 1886. The young black boy in the front row is probably Charles Edward (Ned) Norris, aged sixteen. The identity of the young black woman is not known, but she may be one of Charles older sisters or perhaps one of the Bounds children. It is very doubtful that in St. Andrews Ned Norris or his siblings could have risen to even the modest stature of Mr. Braxton. The record shows that it never happened, certainly. Boston and the larger American centers simply offered more opportunity, in terms of education and opportunity, for blacks, and that may explain a good deal of the gradual extinction of St. Andrews black population.
In 1895 Norris received $200 in back pension money owed him by Congress, a decent sum. That said, the Norris family was not well off. There is no record of their ever having owned land in St. Andrews. And the children did not live long. After Norris' death in 1911 only three children remained. Ned Norris died in 1915, aged 36, leaving only Helen Norris, blind and totally dependent on her younger brother Cadman. Cadman himself is eventually given a house by the generosity of the townspeople but he never married. As the town's only black person, his opportunities in this area were distinctly limited, if non-existent. A curious event occurred at his funeral. Local resident Harry Mallory remembered the appearance of a mysterious black family, who left shortly afterwards and did not mingle with the mourners. This may have been the Bounds family, probably Edward Bounds junior, who remained in Houlton and was a barber like his father.
There aren't many memorials to the blacks of St. Andrews beyond a plaque in All Saints Church to Cadman Norris, "a coloured gentleman," and gravestones for him and his family in the rural cemetery, provided by public subscription. The only other markers are a stone raised to the memory of Moses and Elizabeth Stewart, and their children George Stewart, Jessie Brickson, Almira Bounds and Helen Henderson, and the anonymous markers for Richard and Maria Stewart in the Loyalist cemetery, if indeed those are their gravestones. It is just possible that Jessie herself, being the last to die, herself put up the money out of proceeds of her sale of land to the St. Andrews Land Company. Or it may have been the work of the Norris family, as Maria Norris was Jessie's only child, and did not die until 1922.
George Goodeill, former jailer, told the writer that he had once heard from an older member of the town that there had been a black cemetery located somewhere near Cedar Lane. This seems doubtful. Commons land could never be owned, only leased; was leased almost exclusively by whites, and changed hands frequently. Besides, we have a long list of black parishioners of the Anglican Church who were interred in the Loyalist and Rural Cemeteries. The cemetery in question is probably the Poor House cemetery. The Poor House was located off Reid Avenue between the old golf clubhouse and Cedar Lane; probably the cemetery was nearby. There are references to the burial "in the Poor House burial ground" of at least seven individuals between 1832 and 1860, of which only one - Celia Brush, in 1832 - is identified specifically as black. Most were probably Irish. There was a difference, however, between the blacks and the Irish. Both suffered a great deal but the Irish, at least, had the possibility of upward movement. Though many suffered, some prospered. What was different about the blacks of St. Andrews is that as a group their fate was so uniformly bleak and apparently predetermined. It was surely no coincidence that the black man who lay dying on the golf course in 1948 was a menial labourer, the same profession occupied by just every black man of this town before him. •