GOODFELLOW, ALEXANDER (1794-1867)

GOODFELLOW, ALEXANDER, businessman, supervisor of roads, and JP; b. Miramichi, 1794, s/o David Goodfellow and Janet McCurrie; m. Elizabeth - , a native of Fifeshire, Scotland; d. Saint John, 20 Mar 1867.

Alexander Goodfellow's father, David Goodfellow, was married in Halifax in March 1786 to Janet McCurrie, and his older brother John Goodfellow was born in Nova Scotia before the family migrated to the Miramichi in 1787. As young men, John and Alexander ("J. & A.") Goodfellow were in partnership in a lumbering and fishing business, but their firm failed in 1828, and they were forced to assign.

In the Miramichi Fire of 1825 Alexander Goodfellow, who was residing seven miles below Douglastown, lost his mother; his sister Catherine Goodfellow, the wife of William Luke, and her five small children; and his nephews William and David Russell, sons of James Russell of Lower Newcastle. Three days later his father, David Goodfellow, died "from the effects of the fire, and a severe cold which he had caught while standing in the water to avoid the flames." These were among the most devastating losses known to have been experienced by any family in the conflagration.

In 1829 Goodfellow was appointed a supervisor of 'great roads', and he continued to receive supervisory appointments annually for the next twenty-five years. In the early 1830s he was responsible for the maintenance of the road between Richibucto and Chatham as well as the southern half of the Bathurst road. After 1837 he was the supervisor of the Fredericton-Newcastle road and sometimes of the Fredericton-Woodstock road as well. Among his duties was contracting to have bridges built. In 1839 he announced that he would be auctioning contracts for bridges across the Renous and Oyster rivers. In 1847 he had an appropriation of £900 with which to have a bridge built over the Southwest, at 'Swim's Ferry'.

During the period in which he was a road supervisor Goodfellow was also engaged in private business. He had a store in connection with his home and farm at Lower Newcastle in 1834, and possibly throughout the 30s and 40s. In 1848 he and his son David Goodfellow had the contract to move the quarantine buildings down the ice from Middle Island to Sheldrake Island. Goodfellows & Maltby, a business partnership which he and his son David formed with John Maltby of Newcastle, was dissolved is 1854, the last year in which he was appointed a road supervisor. In 1855 he erected a steam sawmill near his home which had been designed and built by James Neilson of the Miramichi Foundry. Three years later he lost everything to Alexander Rankin and was an insolvent debtor under the bankruptcy legislation then in effect. At around this time he relocated in Neguac, where he was a trader in 1858 and a fisherman in 1861. In 1864 he was appointed harbormaster, as successor to Charles Cameron, deceased, and he made his home in Chatham for the last three years of his life. He was a guest at the Waverley Hotel in Saint John at the time of his death.

Goodfellow was appointed a justice of the peace in 1825. For many years he was one of the few justices who were also commissioned to solemnize marriages. Beginning in the early 1820s, and for more than two decades, he served as a school trustee for Newcastle parish. He was one of the most active of the trustees and was directly influential in the establishment and conduct of the schools east of Douglastown. He had a lengthy career in the militia, in which he was appointed a captain in 1826 and was still active in the 1860s. He was a supporter and later a director of the Northumberland Agricultural Society. He was a tax assessor for Newcastle parish and held various other local offices. He took an interest in provincial politics and was an unsuccessful candidate in the election of 1850.

For some years prior to his death Goodfellow was the senior magistrate in the county and chairman of the County Court of Quarter Sessions. A week after he died a special session was convened, at which it was recorded that, in the exercise of his duties as a magistrate, he had been "firm and consistent," and in his private life, "hospitable, social and agreeable."

Goodfellow and his wife had seven children living at home in 1851, all of whom survived their mother when she died in 1854, at age fifty-eight. The children included Agnes Goodfellow, the second wife of Hugh F. Bain, as well as Alexander R. Goodfellow.