WHO knows and loves New Brunswick thinks of it in terms of little rivers that rush to and fro making fantastic and surprising loops. Coming suddenly upon small promontories enclosed by these loops, as you sail or paddle on the rivers, you are always saying to yourself “What a site for a house!” Usually only cool solitude answers you. But sometimes, miraculously, the house of your imagination appears.
Thus with the Coffin mansion, set in the midst of an old Loyalist estate about ten miles from Saint John on the Nerepis, a tiny tributary of the Saint John River. It is a nice afternoon’s paddle, for though a highway skirts it, the river is the way. Just here the river makes a complete half circle, like an old-fashioned ox-bow. And the marshland enclosed in the half circle is swampy and ferny and wild-flowered. Butterflies rise above it in midsummer noons and fireflies at night, and the trees lean over the banks.
It is through such a vista that you first see Lonewater, a house as lovely as its name. Its forbear was Alwington Manor, built near this point to the [page 52] north-west of the Saint John about 1790 by General John Coffin. General Coffin was the eldest son of Nathaniel Coffin, of Boston, whose ancestors came to England before the Norman conquest, and settled in what is now Devon and Somerset.
General Coffin, a daring Loyalist, began his career as a lieutenant at Bunker Hill. When Cornwallis capitulated, ten thousand dollars was offered for his head, but he managed to escape to South Carolina. Many and dramatic were his adventures, and he was finally sent, as a matter of expediency, to the British province of New Brunswick. Still in his twenties, he arrived in the wilderness with a charming young Southern wife, Anne Matthews, of Charleston, behind whose whooped skirts he had not scrupled, for all his daring, to hide at perilous moments. They brought with them some black servants, one of whose descendants lived, until quite recently, in a little cabin in the woods near Lonewater.
There was an estate of six thousand acres surrounding the house. A large milling business was carried on. General Coffin was one of the first settlers and a power in the community. It is said that he entertained royally at his manor house.
Only a stone doorway sunk deep in the grass remains.
It was in 1832 that Captain, afterwards Admiral, John Townshend Coffin came to this country [page 54] to live near his father. Sailors dug a canal through the marsh making a short cut from the Nerepis to the spot where he built.
Fascinating about these stories of old houses is the fact that they are linked together as families are, with some surprising relationships. Lonewater, sweet and distant, looks back to the ancient Alwington in England, and is a sort of first cousin to the one-time Governor’s residence of the same name, in Kingston…Admiral Coffin married the beautiful Miss Sophie Donaldson, of Saint John, a great aunt of Miss Lillian Hazen of that city. After his return to England the property was bought by Mr. F. Hazen of Saint John and given to his eldest son on his marriage to Miss Mary Grant of St. Andrews. The Kingston Alwington was built by Baron de Longueuil (whose father was a Captain Grant) and General Coffin’s daughter who became the Baroness de Longueuil.
The Hazen house in Saint John is probably the oldest dwelling in New Brunswick. It is just a bit of old building, a commonplace wooden structure set on brick pillars and used now as a store and an Oddfellows Hall. But it has resisted not only time but the various fires that have swept over the city, since it was erected in 1773. The date is known because of an entry in the account book of the trading firm of which Mr. Hazen was one of the founders: “William Hazen, debtor: To four gallons [page 55] of West India rum, eight pounds sugar, three quarts of N.E. run, dinner, etc., etc., etc., etc., and twenty-five shillings for raising his home.”
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Farther up the Saint John, on its western bank, in Lincoln, Sunbury County, is another colonial house widely known as the Belmont homestead. It is bounded on two sides by the Saint John and Oromocto Rivers, and at the mouth of the Oromocto is Thatch Island, so-called because of its coarse grass. It is a strange spot on a northern stream, for in summer the vegetation is almost tropical in luxuriance; wild cucumber vines hang in festoons on the trees, and purple vetch, convolvulus and other flowers give it a sweet beauty.
Belmont was erected in 1820 by the Honourable John Murray Bliss, a Justice of the Supreme Court, and for a time Administrator of Government in the Province. He built his house of yellow pine lumber fastened with hand-wrought nails and lined throughout with bricks, making it frost-proof, and cool in summer. The rooms are large. There is ample provision for entertaining on a generous scale. So perfect was the workmanship that seeing the house to-day, the shingles seem to be as sound as when first put on—the floors, as level.
Unlike most Canadian houses it has remained for generations in the possession of the same family; [page 56] it is still owned in fact by the Wilmots, who purchased it from Judge Bliss in 1837.
The surrounding thousand acres have been much divided, but no one has reconstructed the dwelling which has been the home of two Lieutenant-Governors, a Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, two Judges of the Provincial Legislature and a Member of the House of Commons at Ottawa—a record unequalled in the Dominion, when one remembers [page 57] that all these people were related and that most of them had been born, married and died in the same place, though their various careers had often taken them far afield. In fact, the strong judicial qualities, the intensely mental side of typical Maritime families are nowhere better exemplified than in this fine old home. [page 58] |
