HOWE, DAVIS P. (1820-1895)

HOWE, DAVIS P., teacher, newspaper publisher, and social reformer; b. Co. Tipperary, Ireland, c1820, s/o James Howe and h/w Margaret; m. 1843, Margaret Tweedy, d/o James Tweedy and Elizabeth Duke, of Williamstown; d. Saint John, 23 May 1895.

Davis P. Howe arrived on the Miramichi with several other members of his family in 1836 when he was around sixteen years of age. He possessed a "fair education" and worked for a time as a correspondent for the Saint John Morning News, which was founded in 1840. Between 1843 and 1848 he taught school at Napan, bought and sold books, and operated a book bindery. He moved to Chatham to teach in 1849 and received a training allowance in 1850 to qualify for a 1st class teacher's license at the Normal School in Fredericton.

Howe's school in Chatham attracted a good deal of parental and public interest. Unlike most teachers at that time, who engaged in 'birching' and other modes of corporal punishment, he avoided all physical discipline. Instead he taught his students orderliness and competitiveness. In praising his methods in 1853, The Gleaner stated that the precision with which his eighty or more pupils conducted themselves about the classroom would put the local militia to the blush.

It was noted following the annual public school examinations in 1855 that Howe's was the only school conspicuous for its "comfort, neatness, and accommodation," and that he was raising the funds needed to keep it that way from "juvenile concerts, bazaars, and tea meetings." His was a parish, or common school to which both boys and girls were admitted. In 1851 one of his pupils was Anne Quinlan. At the time, Howe was one of few elementary teachers of either sex to hold a 1st class license. Some years later Anne Quinlan was one of the only women teachers in Chatham to possess one.

In partnership with the pharmacist William Forbes, Howe created the 300-volume "Apollonian Circulating Library," which was operating in Chatham in 1849. Readers could pay an annual membership fee or give books instead. He continued to conduct a bindery and opened a book store, in which he had not only books, but gold rings, watches, and other items of jewelry for sale in 1854.

In 1856 Howe founded The Colonial Times and Miramichi Weekly Gazette, a newspaper devoted to "politics, literature, education, agriculture, commerce, and general intelligence." Politics was his main journalistic interest, and his adoption of pro-labor, anti-establishment positions enraged the businessmen and politicians of the day. An extreme hostility developed, in particular, between him and James A. Pierce, the publisher of The Gleaner, who was driven to distraction by what he described as "the scurrilous lucubrations of the erratic editor of The Colonial Times." Howe's superior wit and colorful language were not appreciated either. When he referred figuratively to the Miramichi as "a howling wilderness," Pierce held the phrase up as evidence of just how absurd and abusive he had become. Although he was an "insolvent debtor" in 1858, Howe persevered with his newspaper, scattered issues of which exist for the years 1856 to 1864.

In the election of 1865, by means of a provision then in effect, Howe nominated himself as a candidate for a seat in the House of Assembly. At the nomination meeting Peter Mitchell stated that he would not vote for him because he had "issued a paper that had traduced, uncalled for, the character of the most respectable merchants and men in authority" and "had striven to excite the feelings of the employed against the employers." A less refined Robert P. Whitney called Howe "a low blackguard and disgrace to humanity" and warned him not to print his name in his "dirty paper." Howe was resoundingly defeated in both the general election and a by-election held in 1865, in which he spoke out passionately in favor of Confederation. He left the Miramichi soon afterwards.

Little is known about the later years of Howe's life. In 1881 a poorly-informed and uncharitable editorial in the Miramichi Advance stated that he had taught a private school recently in Portland, Maine, and that he had taken to drink and gotten himself charged with assaulting a woman. He later returned to New Brunswick and was living in Saint John at the time of his death. An obituary in the Union Advocate depicted him as a broken man. Tuberculosis had robbed him of his wife, Margaret Tweedy, at an early age, and of most of his children. His son D. Palmer Howe, an Ottawa journalist and poet, died in 1874, before he was thirty. His son Dr Joseph W. Howe, a professor of surgery at New York University, and the author of several respected works on medicine, died in 1890, at age forty-seven. When only a few months later, the sad particulars of the death of his son Dr John T. Howe were reported in the New York Herald, the Advocate expressed the belief that the twenty-nine-year-old physician was "the last survivor of the large family of Mr D. P. Howe, nearly all of whom died of consumption."