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Dictionary of Miramichi Biography

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COX, PHILIP (1847-1939)

COX, PHILIP, school inspector; principal of Harkins Academy, 1885-92, and the Chatham Grammar School, 1897-1907; natural scientist; b. Upper Maugerville, N.B., 1 Sep 1847, s/o Philip Cox Sr and Katherine Fleming, both natives of Ireland; m. 1903, Mary Jane Mowatt, of Saint John; d. St Andrews, N.B., 12 Sep 1939.

The census returns indicate that Philip Cox's father, Philip Cox Sr, was of Irish Catholic origin and that he and his first wife, Katherine Fleming, entered New Brunswick in 1838. In 1851 Cox Sr was a thirty-two-year old farm laborer at Maugerville, with no fewer than nine children in his family, ranging in age from infancy to twelve years. He married three times and still had a number of children at home when he died in 1892, at age seventy-four.

Philip Cox Jr attended school at Maugerville and somehow found the means to continue his education at the Fredericton Collegiate and the University of New Brunswick (BA 1871). After graduation he was hired as principal of the grammar school at Gagetown. In November 1879 he was appointed inspector of schools for the newly-designated inspectoral district No. 1, which included the counties of Northumberland, Restigouche, and part of Gloucester. In 1880 he was elected president of the Northumberland County Teachers' Institute. He retained the inspectorate until the fall of 1884. Early in 1885 he accepted the principalship of Harkins Academy, together with supervisory responsibility for the other Newcastle schools.

As an inspector Cox took much personal interest in teachers and pupils and was quick to praise teachers in his reports. As a principal he enjoyed the confidence of all. "Every pupil in the school feels his influence," noted the school inspector, "and the teachers under him are stimulated and encouraged by his example." All the same, he often found himself in conflict with school authorities in Fredericton. In 1890 the Newcastle trustees intervened when it seemed that his relations with the provincial Board of Education were at a crisis point. He surprised both his admirers and detractors in 1892 when he resigned from his position in Newcastle and joined the teaching staff of the Saint John Grammar School. A year later he quit that position too after the trustees failed to provide him with an acceptable job description.

While he was teaching and administering schools Cox was also developing his interest in science, by explorations of the natural world, personal study, collecting, and cataloging. Before he left Harkins he made the acquaintance of the American animal story writer and literary historian William J. Long. In 1889, with a Micmac Indian as his assistant, Long poled a birch bark canoe from Red Bank to the head of the Little Southwest Miramichi, a distance of nearly fifty miles. During several subsequent summers he and Cox made expeditions up the river, in the course of which Cox collected specimens of plants, animals, birds, and fishes. His growing achievements as a naturalist were recognized by the University of New Brunswick in 1890 by the award of a BSc degree, and more emphatically in 1894 when he was the recipient of one of the few PhDs conferred by the university in that era. The findings of some of his scientific inquiries were published in the 1890s in the Bulletin of the Natural History Society of New Brunswick.

In 1897 Cox accepted an offer of the principalship of the grammar and high school at Chatham, as successor to David L. Mitchell, along with the superintendency of all Chatham schools. A centralized school administration had been made possible at long last in Chatham by the union, in 1895, of the three former school districts and the creation of a single board under the newly-incorporated town in 1896.

Cox had been principal at Chatham only two weeks when he set about to organize a natural history club for adults. After a meeting held on 2 February 1897 it was announced that the Miramichi Natural History Association had been "reorganized." The founders were acknowledging as the association's predecessor the Miramichi Field Naturalists' Club. This had been formed in 1883 on the initiative of Roderick MacKenzie, manager of the Bank of Montreal at Newcastle, and had fallen by the wayside with his transfer to Halifax later that year. The organizers and co-founders of the new club were Cox and Dr James McG. Baxter of Chatham. Baxter was the first president and Cox the first secretary (1897-1902). Cox succeeded Baxter as president, and during his two-year term, in 1903, the association was incorporated. An article which he wrote on the life of Moses H. Perley was published in the Proceedings of the association in 1905.

The most controversial incident in which Cox was involved during his stay in Chatham occurred in 1900 when he shot a caribou without a license, allegedly for use by the Natural History Association. The editor of the Miramichi Advance, David G. Smith, who was passionate about the protection of wild life,

Sources

[b] census [m/d] official records / Advance 14 Oct 1880, 14 Jan 1897, 4 Feb 1897, 18 Oct 1900, 9 Jan 1902; Advocate 18 Mar 1885, 28 May 1890, 31 Dec 1890, 31 Aug 1892, 21 Sep 1892, 29 Nov 1893, 13 Jan 1897, 12 Dec 1900, 1 Jan 1902; Allen; Educ. report 1885; Ganong Collection (scrapbook #4); Leader 21 Jun 1907, 22 Sep 1939; MacMillan; Rayburn; scrapbook #94; World 13 Jun 1883, 3 Nov 1883

Notes

A later sketch of Philip Cox, by W. D. Hamilton, was accepted for publication in Vol. XVI of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, which has not been published as of 2013. There is a copy in file #285 of the "W. D. Hamilton Collection," Provincial Archives of New Brunswick.


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