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Dictionary of Miramichi Biography

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ROBINSON, JOHN (1856-1944)

ROBINSON, JOHN, general merchant, game warden, and sporting property manager; b. Saint John, 12 Nov 1856, s/o John Robinson Sr and Margaret Reid; m. 1887, Georgina Elliott, d/o Walter Elliott and Mary Vaughan, of Newcastle; d. there, 17 Oct 1944.

John Robinson was born while his parents were temporarily residing in Saint John and came to the Miramichi with them while still an infant. As a youth he worked for D. & J. Ritchie & Co., and he was employed in Ritchie's store in Newcastle immediately before he opened a small general store of his own in 1884. He stayed in the retail field for ten years and then sold out to Thomas Russell.

An avid outdoorsman and woodsman, Robinson received a provincial appointment in 1898 as overseer of fisheries for Northumberland County. Although he was described by the Miramichi Advance as "one of the most efficient fishery officers the county ever had," he was dismissed a year later for "political reasons." In 1899 he was hired as county game warden and in 1900 as a full-time game, fishery, and fire warden under the Surveyor-General's Department. The latter was a well-paid job which he held until he was named chief game warden of New Brunswick in 1905. The axe fell again in 1908, however, when the post of chief game warden was abolished because it was "not effectively filled." It would appear that he was being held responsible for failing to prevent alleged infractions of the game laws in the Holmes Lake area in 1907-08, for which charges were laid against the New York stockbroker Arthur Robinson. This would have been ironic inasmuch as Henry Braithwaite was later "punished" for preferring the charges.

In 1909 Robinson was hired as manager of the sporting lodge which the same Arthur Robinson had built on Holmes Lake, and of the log mansion which the New York millionaire George D. Pratt was in the process of erecting. In addition to the many other responsibilities of his new job, he had to hire dozens of men with horses to portage supplies upriver from Newcastle, through twenty miles of sparsely-settled countryside and forty miles of forest, to the wilderness retreats of his employers. He had to be in attendance wherever he was needed and was expected to be knowledgeable about all things that New Yorkers in the Miramichi woods were not. His performance was said to have exceeded requirements, and he came to be known around 'the Lakes' as "the man who knows." He had been on the job more than twenty-five years at the time of George D. Pratt's death in 1935. When the newspapers tried to get him to confirm that he had been left $25,000 in Pratt's will, he refused to comment. He just carried on with the work as usual until shortly before his death in 1944, at age eighty-eight.

During the earlier years of his life Robinson played an active part in the Masonic fraternity and was worshipful master of Northumberland Lodge in 1909. He was survived in 1944 by his wife, Georgina Elliott, and two daughters, neither of whom married.

Sources

[b] church records [m] Advocate 23 Nov 1887 [d] Commercial World 19 Oct 1944 / Advance 8 Mar 1900; Advocate 19 Dec 1894, 9 Feb 1898, 22 Nov 1899, 3 May 1905, 24 Jun 1908, 30 Sep 1908, 24 Feb 1909, 27 Apr 1920, 18 May 1938; Ganong Collection (scrapbook #4); Leader 15 Jan 1909; Manny Collection (F182); World 22 Mar 1884


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