STOTHART, JOHN (1805-1885)

STOTHART, JOHN, building contractor; b. Dumfriesshire, Scotland, c1805; m. 1831, Jane Scott, a native of Scotland; d. Douglastown, 6 Dec 1885.

John Stothart was about seventeen years old when he arrived on the Miramichi, and his name is associated with the construction of both private and public structures from an early date. In 1840 he won the contract to built the lighthouse at Point Escuminac, which was the first lighthouse in the Gulf of St Lawrence. It was a wooden building, fifty-eight feet in height, the lantern in which was seventy-eight feet above the high water line. Later in the 1840s he also built the second lighthouse in the gulf, on St Paul Island, off the northern tip of Cape Breton.

It was stated in Stothart's obituary in the Union Advocate that he built "the old quarantine buildings on Sheldrake Island at the time of the ship fever visitation in 1847, and his work was done with so much expedition...the sum of £25 was given him over and above the amount of his contract." The buildings concerned may have been those hastily constructed on Middle Island in 1847 and moved the next year to Sheldrake. His tender for the construction of the first bridge at Doaktown in 1847 was not successful because it was higher than Francis Elliott's, but he later built bridges at other locations in the northern counties of the province. In 1854 he entered into partnership with James Murray to do the truss work on the first North West Bridge. Before they concluded their business relationship in May 1856, he and Murray also built a lighthouse and associated structures on Miscou Island. This was the second lighthouse to be erected in the New Brunswick part of the gulf.

Stothart was a man of principle and of "unstained integrity." He was a longtime trustee of St James Presbyterian Church in Newcastle and was said to have declined an eldership more than once. He and his wife, Jane Scott, who died in 1880, were survived by four sons and two daughters. Their sons included the Miramichi building contractor George S. Stothart, as well as Richard Stothart, a contractor in Gloucester, Mass.