STAPLEDON, BARTHOLOMEW (1812-1900)

STAPLEDON, BARTHOLOMEW, blacksmith and police chief; bap. Buckland, Brewer parish, Devonshire, England, 16 Feb 1812, s/o Richard Stapledon and h/w Grace; m. Mary Ann Dyer ; d. Chatham, 9 Jul 1900.

Bartholomew ("Batty") Stapledon apprenticed and worked as a blacksmith for twelve years in England before immigrating to New Brunswick in 1836. After he spent a year in a Newcastle blacksmith shop, his wife and eldest daughter came from England to join him, and the family settled in Chatham. A blacksmithing partnership which he formed with Hezekiah Horton was dissolved in 1841. He continued on his own as a blacksmith until 1862 and then turned the business over to his son Richard D. Stapledon.

In 1859 a bill was enacted to create a police force in Chatham. Three men were hired, including Stapledon as captain, or chief. He was well-qualified physically, being, in the recollection of Father William C. Gaynor, a giant of a man, "with the muscular grip of a gorilla." However, residents complained at first that he was not spending enough time on the job, that he was really still employed at the blacksmith shop, and so on. It was often thankless work, but he won a sufficient measure of public trust to retain the appointment for more than ten years.

In the 1850s Stapledon was an overseer of the poor for Chatham parish. He was an officer of the Sons of Temperance and a trustee of the Methodist church. He was a member of the Northumberland Agricultural Society for more than fifty-two years and president from 1881 to 1895. To quote the Miramichi Advance, he was "a man of great...determination of character, a good citizen, and a thorough Englishman." He and his wife had twelve children, nine of whom were living at the time of his death in 1900, at age eighty-eight.