GNB
Archives provinciales du Nouveau-Brunswick

Dictionary of Miramichi Biography

1 109 entrées disponibles dans cette base de données
IntroductionIntroduction | Index des nomsIndex des noms | Index des professionsIndex des professions | Index des organisationsIndex des organisations | Recherche plein texteRecherche plein texte | Le DictionnaireLe Dictionnaire

Langue de présentationLangue de présentation
Filtré par : Professions > Colons  [retirer le filtre]
1 de 2
Page 248 de 1109

DAVIDSON, WILLIAM (1737-1790)

DAVIDSON, WILLIAM, founder of the modern settlement at Miramichi; lumber and fishery business proprietor, shipbuilder, JP, and MLA; bap. 26 Oct 1737, as John Godsman, s/o Alexander Godsman and Jean Gordon, Bellie parish, Banffshire, Scotland; m. c1778, Sarah Nevers (a d/o Dr Phineas Nevers and Mercy Green, former Massachusetts residents settled at Maugerville, N.B.); d. Miramichi, 17 Jun 1790.

John Godsman was the son of a family engaged in the fishing industry on the north coast of Scotland. Before leaving home to seek his fortune in Nova Scotia, he adopted the name William Davidson. In 1765, at age twenty-four, he formed a partnership with John Cort, a native of Aberdeenshire, in which he had a two-thirds, and Cort a one-third, interest. He and Cort persuaded government authorities in Halifax to make them a 100,000-acre grant on the Miramichi, with fishing and timber rights attached. It contained a proviso that the partners would bring one Protestant settler to the tract for each 200 acres of land being granted, or a total of 500 settlers during the first four years.

Davidson's grant included the site on which Newcastle was later built and extended up either side of the two main branches of the Miramichi, to present-day Quarryville on the Southwest, and some distance north and west of Red Bank on the Northwest and Little Southwest. He was to share the fishery with the Micmac Indians who were indigenous to the river. Otherwise he was free to exploit its natural resources.

During his first ten years in business Davidson's catch of fish was substantial, and markets were developed in Europe and the West Indies. Furs were also harvested and exported and ocean going vessels constructed. These activities gave winter work to his employees, who were brought to the river from New England, as well as Scotland. The first of his vessels, the 300-ton schooner Miramichi, was built in 1773 and lost the next spring off the coast of Spain, while en route to the Mediterranean with a cargo of salmon and cod. This was not the only ship Davidson lost, and when American privateers began to prey on shipping in the Gulf of St Lawrence in 1775 the settlement was threatened with financial ruin. In fact, the predations of the privateers, in combination with raids carried out by the local Indians, under incitement by American rebel agitators, caused Davidson and most of his followers to leave the grant in 1777 for the greater safety of the Maugerville settlement on the St John River.

While at Maugerville, Davidson conducted lumbering operations on a large scale. He was favorably regarded by his employees and others and in 1783 was elected to represent Sunbury County in the Nova Scotia House of Assembly. In the same year, he returned to the Miramichi to resume the activities he had begun almost twenty years earlier. Within two years he had settled more than twenty new families on the grant, created a shipbuilding yard, and begun construction of a sawmill at Northwest Millstream. After the new province of New Brunswick was formed in 1784, however, authorities were under pressure to make settlement grants to the many Loyalists and disbanded soldiers who were flooding into the province. Davidson's grant stood in the way of such lots being granted along much of the Miramichi River. Thus an inquiry was conducted, which concluded that the terms of the 1765 grant had not been met, particularly in respect to bringing in settlers. Davidson was notified that a process of escheat would be commenced, and in spite of his protests, the grant was revoked. Instead, he was issued a new grant in 1787 of 14,540 acres, consisting of the parcels of land on both main branches of the river that he and his tenants were actually occupying.

Davidson was named a justice of the peace in 1786. According to the inscription on his tombstone he was also a justice of the Inferior Court of Common Pleas, but no record of this appointment has been found. In the first New Brunswick election in 1785 he took one of the two county seats. In response to his victory the high sheriff, Benjamin Marston, called him "an ignorant, cunning fellow" whose political success was attributable to the fact that many voters were employees or tenants of his. It is thought that Marston's assessment was unfair. He felt that friends of the government rather than friends of the local people should sit in the Assembly and was personally supporting candidates who were not residents of the county.

Davidson attempted to continue his many enterprises from the reduced land base by arranging for new contracts and markets and borrowing money to build additional sawmills and other facilities, but he did not live to realize the results of these initiatives. Caught out in a severe storm in February 1790, he developed an illness from which he did not recover, and to which he succumbed four months later, at age fifty-two. He was survived by his wife, Sarah Nevers, and five children, the youngest of whom, Alexander Davidson, was just two years of age.

Sources

[bap] Abstracts of Scottish baptismal records online [d] Davidson / DCB; Graves; Hamilton (NE); Hayward; tombstone

Remarques

Faulty genealogical information in W. H. Davidson's book, William Davidson, was repeated in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography and other publications, including the original print version of this work. The necessary corrections have been made in the introductory paragraph above.


4.11.1