SHIRREFF, ADAM DIXON (1783-1839)

SHIRREFF, ADAM DIXON, businessman; b. Leith, Scotland, c1783; m. 1820, Jane Hunter, a native of Nova Scotia; d. Chatham, 24 Jan 1839.

Adam D. Shirreff's brother Patrick was said to have been a commander in the Royal Navy. He himself was a British army officer who was later settled at Halifax for a number of years. He moved to the Miramichi in 1824 with his wife and eldest daughter and operated a brewery or distillery in Chatham. He also built up a business in fishing mackerel and gaspereaux for the West Indies market. For this purpose he obtained a grant to Middle Island in 1830. He had a fishhouse, 120' x 50', standing on it in 1833, but "he became involved in some way with the Cunards, who seized and appropriated the island and the fisheries." It was his contention that he had been wronged, and while on his deathbed in 1839 he was still expressing the extreme bitterness which he felt towards Joseph Cunard.

In 1831 Shirreff was secretary of the short-lived Chatham Philanthropic Society. In 1832 he was a trustee of the new Presbyterian parochial school, for which the teacher James Millar was recruited in Scotland. He and his wife, Jane Hunter, had five daughters and two sons, all of whom were still alive in 1893. They included Jessie D. Shirreff, the wife of Thomas Vondy; Henrietta Shirreff, the wife of John M. Johnson; John Shirreff; and Adam Dixon Shirreff Jr, a businessman and senior militia officer in Chatham who moved to Cambridgeport, Mass., in 1884.