And some miles up the river one comes upon the capital of New Brunswick, Fredericton, lying all blue and gold in the sun, encircled by her hills and rivers.
The traveler sees a peaceful yet thriving place, a cathedral city as well as a capital, the military centre of the Province, the seat of the Supreme Judiciary and of the Provincial University. He knows that it is also a centre of lumber trade, and a summer paradise on account of good roads, good fishing, and the joys of motor boating.
The historian harks us back to the days of Villebon, when the site of the present city was an Acadian settlement called St. Anne’s Point. It was an Indian camping place as well, and down the St. John came the canoes of the Malicetes, piled with beaver skins. They came to trade with the gentlemen adventurers of France. Villebon, Governor of all Acadia, made the fort just opposite St. Anne’s at the Nashwaak’s mouth his citadel, in place of the abandoned Fort Royal. No one pretended to look for peace in those days. If it [page 85] was not the Indians it was the New Englanders. Villebon had a certain ‘old Ben Church’ and his fleet of New England vessels to fight. But the Nashwaak guns were too many for them.
Generations later the Loyalists built St. John, and when New Brunswick was made a Province, the first Governor, Thomas Carleton, must have remembered the ancient prowess of St. Anne and her invincible fort, for he made Fredericton its capital. In a little building still standing near the present Queen’s Hotel, known as the King’s Provision Store, the General Assembly met for its third session in July 1788. Two years before the first sermon ever preached in the settlement was delivered here. It was later remarked by the Rev. Samuel Cooke, the Rector, that the inhabitants of Fredericton number four hundred, “of whom one hundred attend church, but many of ye common sort prefer to go fishing.”
I do not know who first named Fredericton the Celestial City, but I think it must have been a poet, for the vision of the poet includes all that the historian knows and all that the traveler sees. That vivid background, Indian haunted and pierced by the conquering note of the French, sharpens his imagination, but he also feels the romance of his city of to-day.
The shimmering waters that surround it, rimmed [page 86] by green hills, suggest to him certain celestial qualities. They imply a life of leisured intellectual pursuit, an unhurried happy state that seems to mark this community as a thing apart from the usual scramble of modern life.
In a charming account of his early home, written by Charles G. D. Roberts years ago and never before published, the well-known poet and short story writer describes the beautiful setting in Fredericton. “Drawn about her, the broad and gleaming crescent of the St. John, and opposite to her wharves the lovely tributary streams, the Nashwaak and the Nashwaaksis.”
To look over the city from the cupola windows of the University buildings, across Queen’s Park and the spires of the church steeples, piercing the elm tops half a mile away, is to see far. Beyond the house roofs there is the blue sweep of the river and the white villages of St. Mary’s and Gibson, and further still the town of Marysville where the lumber king, Alexander Gibson, rules his domain. The blue river is often dotted with the sails of wood boats. To quote Mr. Roberts again, “Here and there puffs a neighbouring tug, towing an acre or two of dark rafts, or a gang of scows piled high with yellow deals. On all sides is evidence that Fredericton is the centre of the lumber industry…The scene is one that fills the eye with gracious [page 87] colour and harmonious composition. In the Autumn when the trees flame out with amber and scarlet and aerial purple, when the air swims with a faint violet haze, the picture is one that neither the painter’s brush nor the poet’s pen can do more than dimly suggest.” [page 88]
A gentle charm lies everywhere. I remember the overhanging elm trees, which it seems to me should be part of every Cathedral town. The Cathedral itself, though small and plain to the point of austerity, is one of the most perfect examples of Gothic architecture on the continent. Queen Street, with shops on one side and lawns and trees and river glimpses on the other, is equally typical of tranquil Fredericton. Speaking of the public buildings on Queen Street, Mr. Roberts refers to “the severe gray pile of the Barracks where the men drill behind high walls, that the glints of their scarlet may not bedazzle the passing demoiselles.”
The favourite residence portion of the city is within clear call of the Cathedral bells. Here are most of the handsome houses and the well kept grounds. Below the Cathedral, where the street runs close to the water’s edge, where the bank is lined with willows, where rafts tie up at night along the shore, and where the houses all look out across the river, there stands a dwelling which should be dear to American hearts. The author of “Lob-Lie-by-the-Fire” and “The Story of a Short Life” is beloved of her compatriots. This plain brown house, with the bow windows and the river view, is full of memories of Juliena Horatia Ewing who lived here while her husband, a major in an English regiment, was stationed at Fredericton. Another [page 89] guest not so highly distinguished lived a few hundred yards below Mrs. Ewing’s house, Benedict Arnold, great General and great traitor. At the creek’s mouth near his house, he built small vessels for the river trade.
But the house best known and loved by Canadians in general, naturally within clear call of the Cathedral bells, is the Rectory of the Cathedral, that quaint red brick house now famous as the Roberts’ homestead. Here lived the Rev. George Goodridge Roberts, Canon of Christ Church Cathedral, with his wife Emma Wetmore Bliss, and here Charles G.D., the eldest son, a daughter, Elizabeth, Mrs. S. A. R. MacDonald, Theodore Goodridge, a younger brother, and their cousin, Bliss Carman, all grew up in the happy atmosphere of the Rectory.
Lloyd Roberts says, “It is any day, any month of the year—for what are seasons among friends?—when a word goes round among the Clan that the Rectory is entertaining. That means four hours of undiluted joy, of unrestrained exuberance, a democracy of action that sets aside little differences and tumbles everyone helter skelter into the common basket of enjoyment…There is no master of ceremonies. Possibly the youngest and noisiest—probably yourself—shouts for ‘My ship came home from India,’ and the evening is off to [page 90] a glorious start. How the dust flies from the flowered carpet and the black horsehair sofa! How the knick-nacks tremble on whatnot and mantel! How the framed pictures of the animals disembarking from the [page 91] ark and of Abraham offering up Isaac, sway on their wires until they hang askew! And this is the drawing-room where one came and went sedately on ordinary week days, careful not to disarrange furniture or leave a cushion awry. Grandpa’s explosive gusts, that would have shaken walls less thick, are topped by shrieks and children’s trebles until all is pandemonium and the neighbours, half a block off, shake their heads sympathetically over their knitting.”
Mrs. C.F. Fraser has written a delightful account of the Rectory in the days of “dear Rector Roberts,” as he was affectionately called by the town. “He was,” Mrs. Fraser tells us, “a scholarly gentleman of old English descent. Of winter evenings the favourite gathering place was about the great centre table in the sitting-room, where the young people were wont to read aloud for each other’s amusement the rhymes or stories which the day had called forth….In the summer weather the great old-fashioned garden, haunt of all fragrant and time-honoured flowers, was the favourite spot. There in and about the hammocks with their cousin, Bliss Carman, extending his great length on the turf below, and shaggy Nestor, wisest and most understanding of household dogs, wandering about from one to another for a friendly word or pat, and a score of half tame wild birds fluttering and twittering in the [page 92] trees above, the young people did indeed see visions and dream dreams. It is of this scented garden that Elizabeth, the sister, too frail to companion her stirring brothers in the active sports in which they delighted, sings so beautifully in many of her poems.”
Associated with the academic life of Fredericton for sixteen years, and a vital force in Bliss Carman’s career, as in that of so many of his students now scattered world-wide, was Sir George Robert Parkin, the well known educator, author, and lecturer on Imperial Federation.
To a sportsman and naturalist the environs of Fredericton, its great forests and the waters, are of more importance than the town itself. The moonlit nights of October are the time for moose-calling; and still in the wild part of the woods, bears, lynx and wild-cats are to be found. The great salmon waters of the Miramichi, and the trout waters of the Tobique, the Squateooks or Green River, the cock and snipe covers and partridge grounds are all fairyland to the hunter as well as to the writer. Out of such a background have come great stories such as “The Heart of the Ancient Wood,” “Kindred of the Wild” and “Earth’s Enigmas” by Charles G. D. Roberts. The Rev. H. A. Cody of St. John has written a good lumbering story in the “Fourth Watch,” and the woods [page 93] of New Brunswick have attracted other than our native writers. Dr. Henry Van Dyke has used them for many an essay and story, and so has Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, the Philadelphian novelist, in “When All the Woods are Green,” a charming idyll of out of door life on the Restigouche.
It may be that only one out of every hundred of the travelers who tarry at the Port of St. John, knows the ancient lovely Capital of the Province, for Fredericton has not yet been discovered by the tourist. Charles G. D. Roberts says that is because “she has sat long aloof, Narcissus-like, admiring her own image in her splendid threshold of water, too loftily indifferent to proclaim her merits to the world.” [page 94] |
