february 2024
Editorial
Dear Friends,
For those of you interested in aspects of the history of Sackville’s streetscape, this issue should be of special interest. It deals with one street: Weldon Street. I, for one, found the investigative talents and common interests of Paul Bogaard and Al Smith especially captivating. Every street in every New Brunswick town has a story to tell. The investigative talents of our two authors have uncovered interesting details illustrating how much there is to learn in the many streetscapes of our communities. Paul’s article goes into considerable detail on the architectural features of a section of houses on Weldon Street, while Al informs us about the man after whom the street is named. Once you have completed reading this issue, I am quite certain that many of you will feel that your own neighbourhoods have similar stories to tell. And, if so, send us your stories which may find their own place in later issues. I look forward to reading more about our local streetscapes! In the meantime, may you learn something new about the town of Sackville and, as always,
Enjoy!
– Peter Hicklin
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John E. Hickey and the “Four-Square” at #14 Weldon Street
by Paul Bogaard
Every once in a while, the Tantramar Heritage Trust receives an inquiry about an older house in town. Such was the case with the “Captain Pringle’s Victorian House” featured in issue #101 (October 2022) of The White Fence. Fortunately, there are a number of other members of the Tantramar Heritage Trust I can turn to for help and advice in these cases and the Research Centre has built up a most useful set of resources.1 And, there is always the Westmorland County Registry of property transfers. So, when we were approached about the house at #14 Weldon Street, all of these came into play. Moreover, what began as an investigation into one interesting house grew into a story about how streetscapes develop over time.
Fig. 1 The “four-square” house at #14 Weldon Street, likely built in the early 1900s.
The first thing we check in such cases is the architectural style of the house and its location. These we can see already by a quick look using Google maps… and then driving by to snap a photo from the street. It turns out that #14 Weldon is a classic example of what is often called a “square” house or even “four-square” referring to its footprint. Since they are almost always two stories high (or 2½ if finished under the roof) they form a cube. On this square shape sits a hipped roof (that is, sloped from all four sides) usually with a small central dormer looking out to the street and a porch extending across the front. As with most house “styles” these details can vary from one builder and/or owner to another. Architectural historians say that this style in particular was a conscious stepping away from the exuberance of the late Victorian styles: with cleaner, simpler lines, an efficient use of materials producing affordable, comfortable living on a fairly standard floor plan.
Fig. 2 View of the houses up Weldon Street from #14, including two other four-square houses and the earliest house remaining along this street.
Wikipedia like sources online will say this style began to appear across North America in the 1890s and carried on into the 1930s. In our area, they are first seen in the early 1900s along with the appearance of another somewhat smaller and plainer “cottage” style, shaped more like a rectangle with its entrance in the gable end facing the road; after WWI and into the 1920s we find a few “bungalows” around town more consciously drawing upon features from the Arts & Crafts tradition. Of these post-Victorian styles, however, the four-square is by far the most common with at least 50 to 60 I have counted still standing in Sackville.2
When we look up Weldon Street on the same side as #14, one can see the next house is also “four-square”, and (even though add-ons make it more of a challenge) the one beyond seems to be as well. These three provide useful comparisons: whereas #14 includes a one-story bay window on the side (and a small bay bump out to the right of the front door), the next house up includes a two-story bay. It also sports a different style of dormer and at some point a second-story porch was added. If you look closely you might notice that the house next to #14 has a hipped roof that comes to a short ridge, while #14 does not come to either a point or a ridge but leaves a small flat area. The third house in this set shows yet other choices in dormer, roof and porch, and the dimensions of all three houses are a bit different. Of these three, the siding has been changed on both second and third four-square houses which has taken away some of their original detailing, whereas #14 still has what I take to be its original clapboard siding and therefore still shows its original corner boards, a frieze board just under the eaves, and other moldings around windows, front door, and on the front porch. (We will return to the question of when these three houses appeared in this streetscape.)
The next house up cannot be seen in this photo. It is a brick bungalow in a style built a bit later (with some wonderful Arts & Crafts features still intact) but, just beyond that, the house that emerges from behind the tree, sits at the top of the rise of Weldon Street and has proven to be the oldest remaining house along this street – that is, #22 Weldon.
I had occasion to examine that house, invited by the current owners of #22, at a time when I was working closely with Ben Phillips who was trained in dendrochronology at Mount Allison. That meant we could not only note the manner in which timbers were used to form posts and beams as the core structure of that house but had permission to take samples from some of the larger timbers: Ben could date them quite accurately by examining the tree rings revealed in these samples. That house proved to have been built in 1858, which fit nicely into a broader chronology that sets the context for this whole street.
Al Smith’s book on the origin of names we find on our various Sackville Town streets3 had identified this street as named after Richard Weldon, a professor at Mount Allison University (see below). However, we know Weldon was still a student at Mount Allison during the 1860s and was not fully employed on the Faculty until 1875 by which time a house had already been built in this area. A look at the Walling map of 18624 shows a house in the right area, identified with G. Bulmer, but no street as yet opened up to the public.
Fig. 3 A portion of the map of Westmorland County published by H. F. Walling in 1862, the first to include all buildings. The arrow added indicates G. Bulmer whose farmhouse was located in the area that later became Weldon Street.
From other documents, and Bulmer genealogy, we know that G. Bulmer grew up in a house in this area, which he eventually inherited from his father, James. James is recorded as obtaining a house near here (with barn and other buildings) in 1839, through the Harris and Cornforth families, and it seems likely that this would still have been a log home. James died in 1852 and their home farm passed through the family on to his son, George. In all likelihood, it was George who built the house at what is today #22 on this street, in 1858, when the street itself was still the farm lane that ran from the Bulmer farm to Bridge Street.5 Bulmer passed away in the 1860s and we think Weldon purchased the whole farm in the 1870s.
There was still a farm lane during the eight years Richard Weldon lived there and only after he accepted a position at Dalhousie University in 1883 (where he helped to found the Dalhousie Law School) did this property pass into the hands of the Trueman family. Or, to be more careful, Weldon sold the farm house and buildings with a sizable portion of the property (towards Bridge Street) to the Truemans but marked out a “right of way” that ran along the southeastern edge of the farm, which allowed him to sell other lots to the north. Registry entries show there were at least three of these plus another lot sold to Doull at the Bridge Street end of the property. It is this right-of-way that became Weldon Street, and along with the farm place, the lots Weldon sold would have allowed for up to five homes established along the northwest side of the new street.
I have provided this information in some detail because the next map we have available that actually shows houses along Sackville streets, is the one produced by the local business Stewart & Co in 1899. Fig. 4 shows Weldon Street and includes houses on both sides. At first I wondered if that might include #14 despite my assumption that, as a “four-square,” it was more likely to have been built in the early 1900s. It shows five houses on the northwest side of the street, rather squeezed in between the new railway to PEI, and what we know as Morgan Lane. However, the information from the Registry of property transfers suggests that Weldon’s initial efforts to arrange for a new street and subdivide some of his farmland for residential lots could account for all these houses. In which case, the Stewart map fits in all the houses, at the time, but it is not to scale and is too squeezed to show there was still room for more houses.
Fig. 4 A portion of the map of Sackville published by Stewart & Co. in 1899. The arrow added points to the new Weldon Street intersecting with the new railway line to PEI, and squeezed in between are five houses.
The next property transfer we were able to find was from the estate of Edward Trueman who had passed away and whose heirs seem not to be interested in continuing to farm, since, in 1901, they sold a sizable portion of the farm downhill from the farmstead to Stephen B. Atkinson.
This proved to be another distraction because the Trust is currently working on the memoir of Stephen B. Atkinson, a successful sea captain who we know purchased the home of Christopher Boultenhouse – now the office and museum of the Tantramar Heritage Trust. While it struck me as odd that Captain Atkinson would invest in this property on Weldon, the timing made it seem possible. But a little searching through the “Descendants of Early Tantramar Families” (which you can access on the Heritage Trust website) showed there were two Stephen B. Atkinsons! The middle name of Captain Atkinson was Barnes and the Registry transfer for the Weldon Street purchase indicated a middle name of Bamford. This Stephen B. Atkinson was actually a farmer from Dorchester and he was apparently doing well enough to engage in a little land development in Sackville. By 1904 this Stephen B. had sold one lot from his recent purchase to his brother, Arthur Atkinson, and Arthur then turns around and sells it to John E. Hickey, in 1906.
I think we can conclude that it was John E. Hickey who had the house built at what is now #14 Weldon.6 There the Hickey family stayed until John’s own passing in 1921 and, by 1924, his daughter had inherited it (along with his business) and already by 1926 it had become the home of the Avards, many years later the Crofts, and thereafter several other owners.
Fig. 5 A portion of the map of Sackville published by C. E. Goad for assessing Fire Insurance. This page dates to 1911. The arrow added points to the farmhouse of R. Weldon who in 1883 set aside a right-of-way past his farm to the three lots in the oval, and in 1901 the lots in the square were sold, including what becomes #14 marked by the star.
One document that helps confirm some of our story about Weldon Street’s development is a page from the Goad Fire Insurance book.7 The page shown in Fig. 5 has eight houses along the northwest side of Weldon (in remarkable detail), whereas the Stewart map had shown five. The arrow points at the original farmhouse of Bulmer and Weldon. The oval above indicates three of the lots sold by Weldon in 1883. These all had Victorian style houses built on them in the 1880s or 90s as did the lot at the lower end. That would account for five. Then, the square marks out the portion purchased by Stephen B. Atkinson in 1901 and subdivided, selling the lot with the star to his brother. From this we can see that for a time the farmhouse still had some land with it that the Truemans continued to work. With the Atkinson subdivision we can see the infilling that occurred which explains the difference between the Stewart map’s five houses and this Goad map showing eight, plus confirming that these three four square style houses were all built after 1899 and prior to 1911. At what is now #14, that would have been John E. Hickey building his four-square in (or shortly after) 1906.
Our investigation of #14 Weldon has led to an interesting case (of which there must have been many) illustrating how an early farm was developed into a town street with the lots along it blossoming into a full streetscape, complete with infilling of houses that can still reveal that they were built at different times with different building styles.
Fig. 6 A portion of the article published in issue of #17 of The White Fence (Dec. 2001), which transcribed and reprinted several of the featured businesses including that of John E. Hickey.
And our story doesn’t end there because John E. Hickey not only was listed in the Registry entry as a “merchant” but had at the time been recognized as a successful store-owner for over two decades. In 1902, the local Tribune published a special edition of “Sackville Illustrated” featuring several of Sackville’s local businesses.8
Fig. 7 Photo of article from Chignecto Post Supplement, April 12, 1894, provided by Phyllis Stopps.
John Hickey had grown up amongst the Irish settlers along the “Emigrant Road” just beyond Port Elgin and his “present stand,” as they say, was (as we will show later) at the corner of Main Street and Wellington. This is right where many of us will have seen the Sears Insurance Building standing. This 1902 account also fills us in on the range of goods Hickey was selling. Since we have also found Hickey’s emporium noted a number of times in the student newspaper at Mount Allison – the Argosy – we can also say that his line of dry goods, hardware and glassware in 1884 had expanded to include earthenware by 1891, and then by 1902 included china, trunks, bags, and a new line of gent’s furnishings.9
Fig. 8 A photo provided by Phyllis Stopps catches only a corner of the Hickey Store.
Fig. 9 A painting of the Harness Shop by local artist Rod Mattatall that coincidentally captures the rear end of the Hickey store; provided courtesy of Charlie Scobie.
Curiously, the Hickey store is also mentioned in an 1893 Argosy as located on Bell’s Corner. I must
confess I’ve puzzled about this “corner.” You may have heard of “Crane’s Corner” (and you should be able to guess where that one was, especially if you frequent Cranewood). And there used to be references to “Boultenhouse Corner” (and now that the Heritage Trust has its office and a museum in Boultenhouse’s residence, we rather wish the corner of Main and Queens was still referred to this way). We knew there was a Bell family in Sackville but had not put together the connection until Phyllis Stopps revealed a short article she had found in the Chignecto Post from 1894.10 From it we learn a bit more about John Hickey – a “genial proprietor” – and that his store had been originally founded by a Mr. Bell. So, even if we still do not fully understand how this particular Mr. Bell fit into the Sackville family (James Bell, perhaps?), we now know that for a time “Bell’s Corner” was located where we now find Wellington meeting Main Street. But, about that intersection there is still a layer of local history to uncover.
For many businesses in Sackville that have faded away over the years there are photos we can turn to that help recover where they were located and what they looked like, even if they were caught inadvertently in the background of something else that caught the photographer’s attention. This almost happened with the Hickey store but alas only a peek at the corner. Behind this parade (can you date the cars?) on the very right-hand side of the photo we see the front corner of Hickey’s store (see white arrow pointing at it) and even that is not very well in focus.
And then we can find the opposite corner of the same building, also caught coincidentally. In his painting of the Harness Shop, a well-known local graphic artist (especially appreciated for his sketches and paintings of local buildings), Rod Mattatall managed to provide a glimpse of the rear corner. Interestingly, he also decided to add a team of horses pulling a wagon. This was most apt for bringing the role of the Harness Shop back to mind and happily adding to our story as well. Apparently, the arrangement with these two buildings was that they were placed so as to leave an alleyway between them just wide enough to allow a double team of horses to pass, pulling a wagonful of commercial goods. That alleyway eventually became a full street. For that reason, I suspect, long before there was a “Wellington Street,” folks were already referring to this location as Bell’s Corner.
To capture this development we will, once again, rely on the detailed information contained in the Goad Fire Insurance maps for Sackville, especially because we have a number of them and they capture the facts on the ground at different time periods.
The location of the store John Hickey took over from his former employer, David Dickson – the son-in-law of Samuel Black, one or the other of whom must have obtained the store from Mr. Bell – is shown in the map in Fig. 10 (just follow the arrow). Directly below it is another building that came to be known as the Harness Shop. This situation is what Rod Mattatall depicts in his painting, including sufficient space between them for a team of horses. But what this map, published in 1914, also shows is that Wellington Street had not yet been developed.
Fig. 10 and 11 Both of these are portions of the same page, but from different editions of the Goad Fire Insurance maps. The information imbedded in the map to the left is from 1914, while on the right is information as of 1947.
Fig. 11 is from the same page of the Goad book of insurance maps, but a later edition published in 1947. Here we can see that what was once an alleyway had been developed into Wellington Street which Al Smith’s Aboushagan to Zwicker tells us happened around 1920. However, the space needed to squeeze through a team of horses could not provide the 50’ needed for the new street, so the Harness Shop had to be moved! It was not moved far since it still stands rather close to Wellington Street but not nearly as close as the new street skimmed by Hickey’s store, and to this day it barely skims by the Insurance Building. Now we know why!11
By the time of this later map in 1947 it was John E’s daughter Amy who was carrying on the Hickey tradition. And she did so for some year’s more although she had sold the house at #14 Weldon soon after her father passed away. And so we will conclude our story at this point, having not only uncovered what we hoped to find out about both the Hickey house and store, but also something of how streetscapes in Sackville – both residential and commercial – developed from their earlier configurations as lanes and alleyways to the streets we now take for granted.
Endnotes
1. In this case that included Al Smith, Phyllis Stopps, Donna Sullivan, Karen Valanne, plus my thanks to David McKellar for making so much of the Research Centre available through the THT website, including an increasingly valuable genealogical tree of Tantramar descendants. Unless otherwise indicated, all the photos used are my own and I have edited and annotated all the maps and other photos.
2. By comparison, there are well over 200 Victorian houses still standing in Sackville and of the several distinct styles that arose during the Victorian period, there are more with a central gable – which I wrote about in White Fence issue #101 – than all the other Victorian styles combined.
3. Aboushagan to Zwicker: An Historical Guide to Sackville, New Brunswick Street Nomenclature by Allan D. Smith (Tantramar Heritage Trust 2004). Currently out of print.
4. An important feature of this map published by W. F. Walling in 1862 is that it shows every house, school, mill, church, business etc. It is the first map of our county that does so. A map of Sackville published by Stewart & Co. in 1899 (which we will use further down) also shows many buildings but only a portion of them is identified. Both are available at the Boultenhouse Heritage Centre.
5. I am relying on a series of entries that are recorded in the Westmorland County Registry and will list all of them here [Book #/page#]:
1839 Q/377 J. Harris to J. Bulmer
1852 SS/86 J. Bulmer to George Bulmer [not actually registered until 1863 when Geo. died]
1883 O/425 R. Weldon to C. B. Trueman
1901 B-7/650 Estate of E. Trueman to Stephen B. Atkinson
1904 N-7/540 Stephen B. Atkinson to Arthur Atkinson
1906 T-7/63 Arthur Atkinson to John E. Hickey
1924 I-10/354 Will of John E. Hickey leaving house and store to daughter, Amy
1926 O-10/6 Amy Hickey to Avards
6. It is just possible that Arthur Atkinson built this four-square house and then immediately turned around and sold it. I have not found documentary proof one way or the other but under the circumstances, it seems more likely to have been John Hickey, already a successful merchant in town, who built the house in this new style for himself and his family.
7. Chas. E. Goad was a civil engineer with offices in Toronto and Montreal who produced “Fire Insurance” maps that included enough detail about streets, all insurable buildings (both commercial and residential), along with water supply, fire alarm boxes, etc. that insurance companies could determine risk of coverage. The Mount Allison University Archives holds several of these books as does the Archives at the Tantramar Heritage Trust. This one includes information dating to 1911. They were often revised and the latest one we have dates to 1947.
8. Original copies of this edition from 1902 are held by the Tantramar Heritage Trust but the easiest way to access this special edition is to check out issue #17 (Dec. 2001) of The White Fence at: https://tantramarheritage.ca/2001/12/white-fence-17/
9. These are listed in a sequence of Argosy issues: Oct. 1884 (vol.11:1), Nov. 1891 (vol.11:2), and Oct. 1902 (vol 29: 1), all held in the Archives at Mount Allison University as is the issue (vol.23:3) from Dec. 1893. These were found by Angela Hersey during a summer she was doing research for the Heritage Trust on local merchants.
10. Chignecto Post Supplement, April 12, 1894. Richard Chapman Weldon
11. Once again I am indebted to Phyllis Stopps for this story about the Hickey store. The research she conducted for the Town back in 2003 was captured on 3 CDs which are now held in the collections of the Tantramar Heritage Trust: RC 2020.5. See articles Phyllis wrote in the Tribune-Post for July 22, 1998 and June 11, 2003 that help provide context.
What’s in a Name?
Richard Chapman Weldon
Weldon Street was named after Richard Chapman Weldon (1849-1925) who owned the earliest house and most of the land in the sector of town that was later to become Weldon Street. The earliest map of Sackville produced by Stewart & Co. in 1899 shows the street as Weldon Street.
Richard Chapman Weldon, educator, lawyer, and politician, was a descendant of Yorkshire Settlers John and Ann Weldon who purchased property in the Dorchester area circa 1775. He, along with his seven siblings, was born on a farm in Penobsquis, NB, and educated at Upper Sussex Superior School. Richard attended Mount Allison Wesleyan College graduating with a BA in 1866 at the age of 17. Following graduation he taught school in the Sussex area later returning to Mount Allison to earn his MA in economics in 1870. He studied constitutional and international law at Yale College in New Haven, Conn. and graduated with a doctorate in political science in 1872. Interested in furthering his knowledge of international law and being fluent in German, he studied at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.
He returned to Sackville in 1875, having accepted an offer to come to Mount Allison and teach mathematics and political economy. He was the first PhD on Mount Allison’s faculty. He quickly became known as an excellent educator and during this time he also apprenticed himself to Sackville lawyer Christopher Milner.
When the Dalhousie University’s law school was established in 1883 with an endowment to establish a chair in constitutional and international law, Dr. Richard Weldon was deemed to be the most suitable person to head the Law Faculty. Weldon accepted the Board’s offer to head up the school and thus became the first full-time professor of law in post-confederation Canada.
Soon after getting the law school up-and-running he launched into a second career as a federal MP. He ran and won a seat for the Conservatives in the 1887 election and won again in the 1891 campaign. The law school year at Dalhousie University was altered to accommodate his absence in Ottawa. He became a very highly regarded parliamentarian and apparently at one point was considered as a potential candidate for Prime Minister.
During his entire 31 years as Dean of the Dalhousie Law School he was the sole full-time law professor. Weldon was highly successful in attracting students from across Canada and due to his interest in public affairs was able to instill a sense of public service in his scholars. It is indeed fitting that the law school building at Dalhousie University is named in his honour.
Sources: Smith, Allan D., Aboushagan to Zwicker—An Historical Guide to Sackville NB Street Nomenclature, 2004, publication of the Tantramar Heritage Trust; Dictionary of Canadian Biography; Tantramar Heritage Trust website Descendants of Early Tantramar Families.
