WHITE, JAMES (1783-1869)

WHITE, JAMES, hotel keeper; b. Grange, Co. Wexford, Ireland, c1783; m. 1st, Catherine Barron, of Kilbride, in the same county, and 2nd, 1839, Mary Brophy, also a native of Ireland; d. Saint John, 17 Mar 1869.

James White opened White's Hotel in Chatham in 1820 and conducted it for nineteen years. Most hotels in that period doubled as taverns or alehouses, and his was no exception. According to Father William C. Gaynor he manufactured and sold a heavy beer called "Dunramen" and "was known far and wide as 'Dunramen White'."

In a newspaper notice in 1834 White announced that his hotel could prepare dinners and suppers, complete with wine and other liquors of the best quality, "on the shortest notice." When he withdrew from the business in 1839 and advertised the hotel for lease, it was described as having two chambers, four "sitting rooms," a bar room, pantry and kitchen on the main floor, and a drawing room, nine chambers, and two large rooms capable of holding four beds each on the second floor. Near the hotel were two barns with stables for twenty horses.

White was one of the leading Catholic laymen in Chatham in the 1830s, and it was he and George Taylor who called for tenders in 1836 for the construction and finishing of St Michael's Church.

White was experiencing serious financial problems in 1858, the year in which his second wife died, and by 1861 he had left the county. His age was recorded as eighty-six when he died in Saint John in 1869. He and his first wife, Catherine Barron, had several children baptized on the Miramichi in the 1820s and 30s. They also had a daughter and possibly other children born earlier. Their son James White Jr raised a family in Newcastle.