From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/English/Bruce S. Elliott
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick
The years between the defeat of France in 1760 and the American Revolution saw an unprecedented expansion of settlement in North America, much of it fuelled by the natural increase of the existing population of the colonies that now constitute the United States. But the years 1763–75 also saw a tremendous rush of immigration from Britain to its North American colonies, despite government opposition. Immigrant numbers averaged 15,000 per year. A small trickle of this unprecedentedly large movement of population found its way to the peripheral northern colonies that were to become Canada, and a smaller portion still were English.
In 1767 half of Nova Scotia’s 11,779 non-Amerindian residents were New Englanders who had responded to Governor Charles Lawrence’s proclamation offering grants of land. Of these, the English accounted for only 6.4 percent, or 757 individuals. Nearly 60 percent of the English resided in Halifax County and another 13 percent in adjacent and largely German Lunenburg. Though they demonstrated at this time a greater propensity to be urban than the Irish, the English presence of 449 in Halifax County seems small given that 2,576 settlers had arrived from England to found the city in 1749. The Board of Trade and Plantations had extended its offer of land and provisions beyond discharged soldiers and sailors to include London artificers and their families whose skills, it was thought, would help build the town. But Governor Edward Cornwallis found the impoverished Londoners idle and unwilling to work and had to send to Annapolis for builders. Nearly 1,000 were carried off by an epidemic the first winter and many more moved on to New England. By the 1760s the English accounted for only 12 percent of the county’s population and there were nearly as many Acadians there. The New Englanders rather than the “English rabble” were the ancestors of much of the county’s later population.
Cape Breton accounted for another 9 percent (70) of Nova Scotia’s English, a tenth of that island’s small population. There was only a scattering elsewhere, with the greatest number, 50, at Annapolis, where a 1770 census shows the English thoroughly integrated with the existing residents, married to New Englanders, Irish, and even, in one case, a German; only two households, including that of the clergyman, contained more than one native of England.
During the years 1772–76, for which we have detailed information on departures from England, 815 recorded emigrants took ship for Nova Scotia, 15 percent of the 5,500 English emigrants to America in these years. Most were English farming families embarking from various northern ports. They sailed for Halifax and Fort Cumberland with the intention of settling in Cumberland County on former Acadian lands at the head of the Bay of Fundy, and west across the Chignecto peninsula in what is now eastern New Brunswick.
Almost all were from Yorkshire, and many were surprisingly prosperous, but they were leaving a part of England where farms were being reorganized into more efficient units let at a higher rent. Though many complained of the high rents, most could have paid them had they been willing to reduce their standard of living. The emigration itself ate up the means of some, and a substantial but undetermined number returned to England at an early opportunity. But the English press noted that the emigrants had quitted their farms without great disadvantage and took considerable money with them. Many of the Yorkshire emigrants also shared a common bond in the Methodism that was spreading rapidly in their native county and that they were to play an important role in promoting in the Maritimes.
Their arrival was the direct consequence of recruiting efforts by land speculators who had obtained large tracts of territory in Nova Scotia, as was common throughout frontier areas of British America at the time. Responsible for initiating the migration was the lieutenant governor himself, Michael Francklin, from Poole in Dorset, who had made his fortune in privateering and supplying the troops. Francklin had acquired a tract he called Francklin Manor, located on both sides of the River Hebert near Amherst. Because New Englanders’ initial enthusiasm for Nova Scotia was cooling and some were beginning to leave, Francklin turned his recruiting efforts to Yorkshire, probably aware of the economic changes that were occurring there.
There may have been a small accretion of additional settlers from Yorkshire in the years between the American Revolution and the beginning of the wars with France in 1793, and there certainly was a resumption of Yorkshire immigration to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815. This immigration extended into P.E.I. (briefly) and then, in massive numbers reminiscent of the 1770s mania for Nova Scotia, into the sparsely occupied and newly surveyed lands of Upper Canada (Ontario). Indeed, after 1822 Yorkshire emigration to the Maritimes largely ceased as settlers from northern England flocked instead to the lands near Lake Ontario. Nonetheless, well over a third of all English immigrants who petitioned for land in Nova Scotia and stated a county of origin were from Yorkshire. The most common location of land requested by the English was Cumberland County (26 percent), followed by Halifax (21 percent) and Guysborough and Cape Breton (8.5 percent each). However, less than a tenth of the overseas immigration into Nova Scotia in the early nineteenth century was English.
English immigrants played an important role in the beginnings of the mining industry in northern Nova Scotia. The General Mining Association of London (GMA) commenced coal-mining operations in Pictou County by dispatching a shipload of collier families and mining machinery from the north of England in 1827. More miners and machinery arrived later that year and in 1828. Mount Rundell, “laid out in true English style,” was the home of Richard Smith, the English mining engineer who was the GMA’s agent. He gave Stellarton the name by which it was known until 1870: Albion Mines.
The origins of the English miners are not clear, but a gravestone erected at Pictou by fellow workmen in the 1830s commemorates a native of Tipton in the Staffordshire coalfields. Even by 1838, however, most had left or gone home and the vast majority of miners were local Scots, as was also the case at the GMA’s Cape Breton operations. English miners were still coming to Albion Mines in the 1870s, but they continued to constitute a minority in a much more diverse workforce. By then, too, substantial numbers of English miners were employed in collieries at Hopewell, Middle River, and New Glasgow. In 1871 these four mining districts accounted for 72 percent of the English-born in Pictou County, and another 15 percent of the English-born lived in the town of Pictou; these districts also accounted for two-thirds of those of English descent in the county.
By that time, urban and industrial life was becoming the lot of most English arrivals in the province. At Confederation, English immigrants lived mostly in Halifax and in northwestern mainland Nova Scotia; 41 percent were in Halifax-Dartmouth and another 23 percent in the northern Gulf counties, mostly urban in Pictou though more widely distributed in Colchester and Cumberland. There were 16 percent along the Fundy shore, progressively fewer as one proceeded south, only 7.6 percent on the south shore (half of them in Yarmouth and Shelburne), 5.4 percent in Cape Breton (two-thirds in the mining areas), and 2.4 percent in adjoining Antigonish and Guysborough.
The English were only slightly more proportionally significant in New Brunswick, where three-quarters of the 1,200 residents in 1767 had been New Englanders and only 25 inhabitants English, most of them in the Cumberland settlement. In 1861 the 4,909 English immigrants then in New Brunswick accounted for 11 percent of the foreign-born population, placing them just behind the Scots in what had become a largely Irish province (69 percent of immigrants were Irish).
The census provides a more accurate picture for Saint John than do Custom House statistics, which indicate that, in the years 1829–38, 94 percent of the 41,195 immigrants who landed there from the United Kingdom had sailed from Ireland. Many Irish used Saint John as a port of entry for the eastern United States. Nonetheless, by the 1840s immigration into the province was 99.4 percent Irish and in the 1840s immigration from English ports into New Brunswick amounted to only a hundred or two annually, mostly out of Liverpool, except during the Irish famine years in the latter part of the decade.
The 1861 census provides the first reliable portrait of the English in New Brunswick. Of the 4,909 natives of England then living in the province, 19 percent were living in the city of Saint John and 4.5 percent in Fredericton, as opposed to 23 percent and 3.5 percent of the Irish. The greatest proportional concentration of English was in York County around Fredericton but even there they accounted for only 23 percent of the immigrant population. The second most notable concentration was in Westmorland and Albert counties, where the English accounted for a fifth of the foreign-born, and in adjoining Kent County, where they made up 17 percent. The English population in these three counties represented, in part, a perpetuation of eighteenth-century Yorkshire settlement in the province.
Despite the heavy mercantile traffic between England and the Miramichi, the populations of the northeastern New Brunswick counties were among the least English in 1861. In most of the Miramichi valley (Northumberland County), English settlement was both thin and early, dating from the post–American Revolution years through the mid-1820s with a further accretion in the early 1830s. In most parishes, few or no English arrived after 1836. West Country families appear to have shunned the Miramichi agro-forest economy for the more prosperous farmlands of P.E.I., even though some north Devon emigrants en route to the island landed in the Miramichi and a few remained. Later English emigrants on the Miramichi located mostly in Chatham, where a scattering of English tradesmen and officials was supplemented by shipwrights, sailmakers, block-makers, and riggers working in the shipyards.
At Confederation, two-thirds of New Brunswick’s English immigrants were living in the Saint John valley, but few in its upper reaches (2.2 percent). A quarter lived in Saint John and Fredericton, while around 12 percent resided in the traditional English settlement in the Westmorland area and another 9 percent in Charlotte County on the Maine border (half in St Stephen and St Andrew’s). Only 6.6 percent lived on the Miramichi and 2.9 percent around the Baie-des-Chaleurs.
