Map
(If map doesn't open right away,double click on the little icon in the upper left hand corner of the space set aside for the picture.)
Find the word Lancaster. Everything from the west boundary of St John City in
1784, including Fairville, South Bay, Pisarinco,
right through to the county line between Charlotte and St John Counties at
Point Lepreau is the Parish of Lancaster as it was originally set out. The
Parish of Musquash was created out of the Parish of Lancaster in the early
1800s and it was everything west of a line that ran from the Bay to the east of
Pisarinco parallel to the county line to the west
right up to the north boundary of St John County.
There were settlements at Dipper Harbour and Musquash prior to the Belding family settling in Chance Harbour in 1805. Daniel Belding had a trading post and the mainland on the east side of Little Dipper Harbour from the earliest time probably around 1785. He traded with the communities of Dipper Harbour and Musquash and into St John. He piloted shipping the 15 or so miles by sea from Chance Harbour in and out of St John Harbour – an area with some of the trickiest currents and highest tides of any major port in the world.. We know he was in Chance Harbour soon after he arrived in New Brunswick for he buried a drowned soldier that washed ashore in 1795 in the Old Place Cemetery on the Graveyard Spit separating Little Dipper Harbour from Belding or Thompson Creek, call it what you might. This date is on the memorial cairn in the graveyard.
A number of members of the Thomas family to whom Daniel Belding and Mabel Bristol were related also came to St John and took up grants in Mispec on the east side of St John Harbour where a number of their descendants live today. Felix Thomas, a cousin of both Daniel and Mabel came to live and take up the crown grant of the adjoining 100 acres east of the Belding grant. According to his petition for the land grant, he had been in Chance Harbour since 1825 which is the year Jane Thomas married David Belding, the son of Daniel and Mabel.
The people that married into the Belding family through the years mostly came for Musquash which was a large and active area in the 1800s with fishing, farming, lumbering, sawmills, a cotton factory, a brick factory and a pork products operation. All these businesses went into a steep decline after the 1880s compounded by a flood and a fire such that by 1920 the population was just a fraction of what it had been at its peak. In particular, these families mentioned earlier were the Hargroves, Hepburns, Traftons, Waynes or Wenns as they are alternately called, and the Crawfords. There was a large community of Tiners at Pisarinco which is now Lorneville in the mid 1800s. Robert Thompson was on his way to seek work in St Andrews in 1846 when he stopped off at Chance Harbour and was hired by the Beldings and then in 1847 married Mabel Belding, the eldest daughter of David and Jane nee Thomas Belding. The rest, as they say, is history.
In any event, this map gives you a good idea of the area around Chance Harbour.
This
page created Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Harry MacDonald
RR 2 Gananoque, On
K7G 2V4
Ph 613 382 8607
Fx 613 382 8673