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Dictionary of Miramichi Biography

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WILSON, WILLARD WESTON (1879-1949)

WILSON, WILLARD WESTON, sportsmen's guide and outfitter; b. McNamee, 3 Jan 1879, s/o John Turnbull Wilson and Lydia L. Avery; m. 1903, Sarah Carroll, d/o Thomas Carroll and Elizabeth MacKinnon, of Carroll's Crossing; d. McNamee, 18 Mar 1949.

Willard W. Wilson's ancestor, John Wilson, a native of Scotland, settled in Ludlow parish in 1804, and for 150 years or more his descendants have been associated with both the lumber and sports industries on the Upper Southwest Miramichi. The first to work as a guide and sport outfitter was John Wilson's youngest son, William Wilson. He had Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, an uncle of President Theodore Roosevelt, at his place to fish in the late 1850s, as recounted in Roosevelt's book, The Game Fish of North America.

Willard W. Wilson, like most of his rural Miramichi contemporaries, was basically a farmer and woodsman, but he had numerous other interests. He was a self-taught veterinarian, with a small library of books on the subject, and like his father and other men in the family, he was an expert salmon fisherman and guide. In 1928 he opened Wilson's Camps at McNamee, a modest sport-fishing establishment which was soon well known in the province and elsewhere in Canada and the United States. When he died in 1949, his son Murray Wilson succeeded him in business, and under his direction Wilson's Camps grew to be one of the leading sport outfitters in New Brunswick.

Wilson and his wife, Sarah Carroll, had eight children who survived infancy. Their eldest daughter, Marie Wilson, trained as a nurse in New Hampshire and worked in the infirmary at Dartmouth College. From her, members of the Dartmouth staff learned of Wilson's Camps and came to fish on the Miramichi. Subsequently two of the Dartmouth men helped two of the younger Wilson sons get through college. One of the two was Willard Woodrow Wilson, who graduated from Dartmouth in 1941, and later from McGill University in medicine. The other was James Reginald Wilson, a musically-gifted young man who excelled at Dartmouth, and later at the Julliard School of Music in New York, and had an outstanding career as a concert pianist and harpsicordist. Also a musicologist, educator, and author, he was the music expert who collaborated with Louise Manny in the editing of Songs of Miramichi.

Sources

[b/m] Wilson Genealogy [d] Leader 25 Mar 1949 / Appleton's (re. R. B. Roosevelt); Bamford; MacKinnon; Manny/Wilson; Telegraph 11 Oct 1995 (article by Philip Lee)


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