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Provincial Archives of New Brunswick

Dictionary of Miramichi Biography

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MCCURDY, EDWARD ADAMS (1864-1923)

MCCURDY, EDWARD ADAMS, banker and businessman; b. Middle Musquodoboit, N.S., 29 Feb 1864, s/o James McCurdy and Amelia Archibald; m. 1898, Anna Ritchie Wheeler, a native of Runnymede, Que., who was adopted and raised by Robert and Annabella Ritchie, of Newcastle; d. Newcastle, 18 Jan 1923.

Edward A. McCurdy was a grandnephew of the Rev. John McCurdy and a brother of both the Nova Scotia politician Fleming Blanchard McCurdy and the Princeton-trained physicist Harold McCurdy. As a young man, he entered the Merchants Bank of Halifax (which became the Royal Bank of Canada in 1901). He had postings at Truro, Maitland, and Bridgewater, N.S., as well as in Montreal and on the French islands of St Pierre and Miquelon. He was transferred to the Miramichi about 1896 and was manager of the bank's Newcastle branch for the next twenty-three years. In December 1919 he left the banking field and established a general insurance agency in Newcastle.

In 1910 McCurdy was one of the incorporators of the Newcastle Steamboat Co., of which Patrick Hennessy was president. In 1912 he founded the Miramichi Publishing Co. to take over publication of the Union Advocate, the Newcastle weekly newspaper which had been established in 1867 by William C. and James J. Anslow, and which was supportive of the Conservative political agenda. In 1913 he was one of the incorporators of the Canadian Gear Works at Newcastle, two of the other principals of which were Swedish businessmen.

The many ventures in which McCurdy had been involved provided fodder for his political opponents when he became the Conservative candidate for the Northumberland County seat in the 1921 federal election. The politically-Liberal North Shore Leader set out to convince voters that he had been engaging in questionable business practices for a long time and that he had been fired from his position in the bank, not retired on pension as he stated. This may have been nothing more than political libel, but the fact that he had just become one of the first two persons in the county to be convicted of failure to file income tax returns lent credibility to the accusations of his detractors and no doubt contributed to his 1400-vote defeat at the polls by the Liberal, John Morrissy.

McCurdy was the founding president of the North Shore Automobile Association, which was formed in 1909 "for the improvement of the highways and the promotion of good fellowship." He was the treasurer for some years of the board of trustees of St James Presbyterian Church, and treasurer of the Miramichi Hospital Board from its beginning in 1916 until his death. He was secretary of the Newcastle Board of Trade for fifteen years and president of the Maritime Board of Trade in 1919, after it had been dormant for four years. He and his wife, Anna R. Wheeler, who died in 1918, at age forty-nine, were survived by two daughters and a son.

Sources

[b] McCurdy Genealogy [m] official records [d] Advocate 23 Jan 1923 / Advocate 28 Jun 1910; Busy East, Sep 1919; Leader 16 Jan 1920, 11 Feb 1921, 2 Dec 1921, 5 May 1922; PPMP; tombstone; World 6 Mar 1909


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