SWIM, FRANCIS DUNCAN (1863-1945)

SWIM, FRANCIS DUNCAN, businessman, sawmill owner and MLA; b. Doaktown, 21 Apr 1863, s/o William Swim and Caroline Amos; m. 1889, Merena A. Merrithew, of Keswick, N.B.; d. Doaktown, 19 Jan 1945.

Francis D. ("Frank") Swim attended school at Doaktown and took a commercial course in 1887 from a college in Belleville, Ont. In 1893, as elsewhere noted, he and a Fredericton partner bought Robert Swim's interest in Swim & Son, and he was afterwards in business for several years with his cousin Henry Swim. When H. & F. D. Swim dissolved in 1909 he retained 12,000 acres in timber limits. In 1917 he was conducting sawmills both at Doaktown and Lincoln, near Fredericton. He was elected president of the New Brunswick Lumbermen's Protective Association in 1918. In 1920 he was an incorporator of the Southampton Lumber Co. He was president of the Fredericton Steamship Co. and a director of the Victoria Steamship Co., both St John River firms.

Swim was in deep financial trouble in 1921 and also had the dubious distinction that year of being one of the two first men in the county to be charged and found guilty of failing to file income tax returns. He and a remaining business partner assigned in 1922, being $58,000 in debt. The Doaktown mill and timber limits passed at that time to the E. Burtt Lumber Co. of Burtts Corner, N.B.

Swim was a county councillor for thirty years and the principal spokesman during much of that time for the residents of the Upper Southwest Miramichi. He was elected warden of the county in 1914. In 1908 he was unsuccessful in a bid to win a seat in the Legislative Assembly, but he was elected in 1912 for the Conservatives and sat until 1917. When he was defeated in the election held that year he retired from politics.

Swim was the author of an article entitled "The Quarryville-Plaster Rock Road," which was published in The Maritime Advocate and Busy East in 1936. Many years previously, his wife, as "Mrs. Frank D. Swim," was editor of the Doaktown Review, the only known issue of which was published in 1902. Her much-reprinted historical sketch of Doaktown first appeared in this paper. She died in 1946, at age eighty-three. A son, William K. Swim, resided at Doaktown. Two other sons, Earle L. Swim, and Frank L. Swim, a medical student at McGill University, died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. The family was Baptist.