Glimpses of the Past: History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784Raymond, W. O. (William Odber)
History
Glimpses of the Past: History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784
Raymond, W. O. (William Odber)
New Brunswick -- History; Saint John River Valley (Me. and N.B.)
Today the old pioneers of 1764 would hardly recognize their ancient
landmarks. The ruggedness of old Men-ah-quesk has in a great measure
disappeared; valleys have been filled and hills cut down. The
mill-pond where stood the old tide mill is gone and the Union depot
with its long freight sheds and maze of railway tracks occupies its
place. "Mill" street and "Pond" street alone remain to tell of what
has been. The old grist mill near Lily Lake and its successors have
long since passed away. It certainly was with an eye to business and
not to pleasure, that Hazen, Simonds and White built the first roadway
to Rockwood Park. Could our pioneers in trade revisit the scene of
their labors and note the changes time has wrought what would be their
amazement? They would hardly recognize their surroundings. Instead of
rocks and crags covered with spruce and cedar, with here and there an
open glade, and the wide spreading mud flats at low tide they would
behold the wharves that line our shores, the ocean steamships lying in
the channel, grain elevators that receive the harvests of Canadian
wheat-fields two thousand miles away, streets traversed by electric
cars and pavements traversed by thousands of hurrying feet, bicyclists
darting hither and thither, squares tastefully laid out and adorned
with flowers, public buildings and residences of goodly proportions
and by no means devoid of beauty, palatial hotels opening their doors
to guests from every clime, institutions for the fatherless and the
widow, the aged, the poor, the unfortunate, the sick the insane,
churches with heaven directing spires, schools whose teachers are
numbered by the hundred and pupils by the thousand, public libraries,
courts of justice and public offices of nearly every description,
business establishments whose agents find their way into every nook
and corner of old-time Acadie, railways and steamboats that connect
the city with all parts of the globe, splendid bridges that span the
rocky gorge at the mouth of the St. John where twice in the course of
every twenty-four hours the battle, old as the centuries, rages
between the outpouring torrent of the mighty river and the inflowing
tide of the bay.
A few years since the writer of this history in an article in the New
Brunswick Magazine endeavored to contrast a Saturday night of the
olden time with one of modern days.[69]
[69] New Brunswick Magazine of October, 1898, p. 190.
[Illustration: A COTTAGE OF TODAY.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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