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Saint Croix Courier, St. Stephen, NB
May 17, 1894

GLIMPSES OF THE PAST

Contributions to the History of Charlotte County and the Border Towns.

CXVI – THE CAPE ANN ASSOCIATION.

Gen. Rufus Putnam, writing to the United States authorities in connection with the disputed eastern boundary, December 27, 1784, says:-

The town of St. Andrews has between two and three hundred houses, and a town at present called Schoodick near the head of navigation has one hundred houses; besides which there is a township at the head of Oak Bay granted to a company of associates at the head of which is a Mr. Norwood from Cape Ann; another township west of this is surveyed for a company from Connecticut, and these companies obtain the same supplies of provisions as the refugees do.

The latter statement, if true,¹ is certainly very remarkable; as many of the Cape Ann Association probably were not Loyalists, nor even in sympathy with the Loyalist cause.  Some were attracted by the wealth of the forests and the supposed fertility of the soil; for the favorable reports that had induced the eastward movement before the war were apparently still current; and at least one, who had been an active supporter of the Revolution, is said by his descendants to have come here chiefly for the sake of living under a settled government; believing, from the lawlessness which then prevailed in the states of the new republic, that the Americans would never be able to govern themselves.

Lands were laid out for the Cape Ann Association in St. David.  The tract, sometimes called the Wentworth Plantation, includes Tower Hill and Lever Settlement.  The names of the associates, as given in the grant of October 1, 1784, are as follows:-
 

Four years later there were 147 absentees, and in 1790 all but 46 lots were escheated.  A new grant was made in 1797, to Henry Goldsmith and others; another in 1800, in which Capt. Goldsmith’s name again stands first; and still another, to Thomas McLaughlan and others, in 1810.

¹Rev. W. O. Raymond writes:-
‘I think the statement may have been quite correct.  Governor Parr, in 1784, encouraged twenty families to remove from Nantucket to Dartmouth in order to carry on the fishery; and he may have wished to promote the influx of a similar class of settlers at Passamaquoddy, more particularly as he was anxious to settle the Passamaquoddy region and thus strengthen the British claims to the territory between the Magaguadavic and St. Croix.