Description

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In 1783, persons who remained loyal to the British Crown during the American Revolution began arriving in the Province of New Brunswick, fanning out throughout the St. John River watershed and settling down on lands ultimately granted to them by a grateful government. Over the course of the next several generations, rural New Brunswick's communities grew, institutions formed, industries rose and fell and trees were cut for use at home and export abroad. By the dawn of Confederation, mature communities in rural New Brunswick had reached a limit. If they weren't in actual decline, the holding capacity of the land had been reached, hence out-migration became the only remedy for many descendants of the original Loyalist families. Law and history Professor Rex Grady examines one particular group of families who settled in Sunbury County, New Brunswick, places them in the context of institutional, political, social and economic developments both in the County and the Province as a whole, and follows them to the largely unsettled district of North Lake on the border with the State of Maine. Along the way he tells the often riotous story of the Oromocto's leading figures, politicians, ship builders, lumbermen and preachers who vied with one another and nature to preserve, shape and expand the world within which they lived. Drawing on New Brunswick's uncommonly rich archival sources and written in a style evocative of the era it chronicles, the book is both a homage to Pre-Confederation New Brunswick and a tribute to those who built the Province during the period from the American Revolution to the passage of the British North America Act.