CUPPAGE, JOHN (1766-1849)

CUPPAGE, JOHN, lumber operator and JP; b. Ireland c1766; d. Red Bank, 4 Dec 1849.

John Cuppage arrived on the Miramichi around 1818, and in the early 1820s he formed a lumber and trading partnership at Red Bank with James White, a much younger man from Co. Down, Ireland. Cuppage & White had a 15,000-acre mill reserve on the Little Southwest Miramichi and built up a large establishment. This included a tavern which was a focal point of the North Esk parish community in the 1820s and 30s. Unfortunately, the partnership came to a sad end in September 1837, when James White was drowned in the Northwest, at age forty-two.

An inventory of the assets of John Cuppage, as successor to Cuppage & White, was given in a notice of sale in 1840. This listed several lots of land, six houses, including a "mansion house" with "large accommodations," two barns, which could stable thirty horses and horned cattle and store thirty tons of hay, a smith's forge, and a water-powered sawmill which could cut 1.6 million feet of lumber annually, and was "equal, if not superior, to any sawmill in the western hemisphere."

Between 1824 and 1847 Cuppage occupied nearly two dozen North Esk parish offices, including those of trustee of schools and overseer of the poor. He was appointed a justice of the peace in 1838. In the election of 1842-43 the North Esk parish poll was held at his establishment at Red Bank. According to John Hea's account he was then "a very venerable looking gentleman," of about eighty years of age, "with hair as white as flax."

Financial misfortune befell Cuppage in 1843 when Gilmour, Rankin & Co. won a court judgment which resulted in certain of his assets being seized by the sheriff. When he died in 1849, at age eighty-three, it was as a consequence of a tragic final accident. "Being left alone for a few minutes," stated The Gleaner, "he unfortunately fell upon the hearth and was so severely burned that he survived only a few days." A posthumous blow was struck in 1850 when a relative, Robert Purdon, who had been his 'factotem' at Red Bank, was found guilty of forgery and sentenced to five years in prison.