JOHNSTON, JAMES (1829-1888)

JOHNSTON, JAMES, teacher and Newcastle postmaster, 1858-88; b. Dumfriesshire, Scotland, 5 Dec 1829, s/o Thomas Johnston(e) and Mary Halliday; m. 1861, Sarah McCully, of Fredericton; d. Newcastle, 29 Feb 1888.

James Johnston came to the Miramichi with his parents from Lockerbie, Scotland, when he was about ten years of age. The large family settled at Napan for a short time and then at Bartibog, where the parents were still living in 1888.

Johnston was teaching at Oak Point in 1849 and possibly until 1856, when he took a school in Newcastle parish. Two years later, upon the resignation of Jared Tozer, he was appointed postmaster at Newcastle. Dubbed "Posty" Johnston, he occupied the position until 1886, when he was thrown from a cart and dealt a severe head injury. His wife, Sarah McCully, who was also a former Newcastle teacher, took over the post office pending his recovery, but he gradually declined until his death occurred in 1888, at age fifty-eight.

Johnston and his wife had a daughter and six sons who lived to adulthood. A family tombstone inscription states that their son Thomas G. Johnston died in Allahabad, India, in 1909. Their son Henry H. Johnston studied medicine for a time before opening the Fountain Head Drug Store in Newcastle in 1890. He appended the initials "PhG" to his name in his advertisements, but he was prosecuted in 1894 for selling drugs without being registered as a pharmacist. He sold the business a short time afterwards to Norman R. Mackenzie, a brother of J. D. B. Fraser Mackenzie, and left to seek his fortune in the mining industry in British Columbia. He died in a car accident in that province in 1933. Two of his brothers died in California in the late 1930s.