Saint John N.B. History - personal projects of Lost Valley readers

.
Since this Blogs inception in 2007, I have given prominence to the wonderful J.B. Comingo painting of Saint John as it appeared in 1814. There are several vintage images which show the city from roughly the same vantage point, but I like this water colour because it was formerly in the possession of the Hazen family, and the Hazen's once owned much of the Lost Valley. A few readers have asked that I match Comingo's 1814 view to a modern photograph. Here is a colour postcard printed for the Howard Johnson hotel when it was newly opened in the North End.

This colour postcard matches the vantage point of painter J.B. Comingo when he painted his landscape of Saint John in 1814. (top of this page) An engraving of his painting was made, and used to produce a print suitable for framing. Three or four versions of that image seem to have been produced, and they do turn up on eBay auctions.

I hold several cities and towns in my heart and in my head, but I'm also very conscious of the sage advice of Canadian author Margaret Laurence, on the subject of identity. Ms. Laurence insisted that we be aware of, and appreciate, how childhood shaped us. It's important for me, proud as I am of the old North End, to invest some time and effort in honouring the lives and landscape where my personal world began.

Richie Ellis is a life-long resident of Saint Johner and he is "obsessed" with the history literally beneath his feet. He is driven by a need to know what really happened in the past - perhaps even to fill in one of the many gaps which exist in the published record of the port city. Richie is not competing with those who print books or sell heritage tours. What he does is to constantly poke about in back lanes, vacant lots, railroad cuttings and ruined industrial sites looking for clues. He figures it's a niche that few others have the stamina or interest to fill. Richie just wants to know what once existed in the Valley and where he might disinter fresh evidence of our past:

"Since I was a little boy growing up in East SJ I was always drawn to places that had this look about them. Like something was there or was supposed to be there. The nail factory remains on Golden Grove Road I found when I was in Grade 2 in Forest Hills, out on a bike ride one Saturday morning. As I got older I always put off going adventuring, thinking that where I wanted to go and what I have always wanted to check out, would always be there. Sadly, that just doesn't happen in life."

One of Richie Ellis' mystery objects. He has gathered many such objects in a lifetime of scouring forgotten corners of Saint John and its environs. His special interest is probing abandoned industrial sites or locating spots where old Saint John industry once stood.

With old municipal maps in hand, Mr. Ellis enjoys spending his weekends "hunting down the factories that were here at one time." In the manner of the old-tyme pot hunters he turns curiosity into action - at a likely spot he bites the ground with his shovel and is sometimes rewarded with pay dirt. The find may be as common as a medicine bottle or a spoon, but because it was the property of one of our ancestors, it is valued by the finder.

The record of Richie's many walks and of his found objects will never be charted by a professional cartographer, but it is real and it is significant. Every LOST VALLEY reader who has written to me has described his or her own mental map. [If you are unfamiliar with the term, please read MENTAL MAPS by Peter Gould and Rodney White, Penguin, 1974. I read it in high school. The books' influence on me is obvious. I was equally impressed by Peter Fleming's lessons on Saint John's urban geography. He was my favorite teacher at S.J. High.

A wonderful example of a Mental Map put to paper - this one by a New York City artist is found HERE.] Some personal maps are as simple as a sketch on the back of a napkin, but others, including my own, are very detailed. Our memory maps are overlain with layers of experience and association, and populated by people we once knew or observed.

The working hypothesis of the Lost Valley project is that there are two existing realities which derive from the failed experiment with Urban Renewal in Saint John. Yes, North End and East End neighborhoods were knocked down, ridding the municipality of the hated tenements and redefining the commercial core. Yes, thousands of residents were made to choose between the highway or the suburbs. The irony is that the old neighborhoods still exist, because we preserve those streets in our heads. Only when we are dead will the Valley be permanently lost. If I can pull together enough of your memories, I may yet weave a coherent whole, a salvaged reality which will survive us and mark our place.

William Jones is a Saint Johner who is doing his Masters in History at U.N.B. Fredericton. He writes, "I had no idea there had ever been a community where the thruway now is. For people my age, it just seems that it was always that way. My family was also displaced by urban renewal, but they lived on Courtenay Street in the East End, a street that doesn't exist anymore."

.

William is busy researching his thesis and I must say that it is an original and interesting topic - "I'm researching the use of the Loyalist image to sell Saint John to tourists from 1883-1983ish. Especially the big (bi)centennials and the Loyalist Days of the 1970s." He mentioned in his first email that the thought occurred to him that the "Irish Revival in Saint John" in the 1980s was somehow a reaction to what was essentially an exclusionary festival. I have my own views on the Loyalist myth but I won't presume to cut another historian's grass. I too have researched the marginalization of the large Irish Catholic population, a community which organized its own celebrations, often scarcely noted by the wider populace. The Protestant-Catholic divide was a vestige of 19th century attitudes, and though it is gone now, it was not quite dead even as late as the 1970s.

My only boyhood participation in Loyalist Days was limited to watching the parade go by. With a grandfather who was a bandsman, from an early age I was a sucker for any parade which included marching bands. I wish Mr. Jones every success with this worthwhile project and look forward to reading some of his findings a year or two from now.