Moncton was an early and enthusiastic adopter of the “horseless carriage,” or as we call it today, the car. In the early 1900s, automobiles were promoted as being safer for the people of Moncton than horse-drawn wagons because they would put an end to an almost mindbogglingly specific menace.
Apparently, train whistles would scare the horses on Main Street, many of whom immediately charged right through the nearest shop windows.
(Examples include horses crashing through the windows of Charters’ China Shop; Parker’s Five & Dime; Globe Laundry; O’Neill’s Clothing Store; Thompson’s Jewellery, and, in an ironic twist, Moncton’s first ever Ford dealership.)
In his book ‘A History of Moncton,’ Lloyd Machum recounted the story of one the earliest cars ever seen in Moncton:
“James McCleave, manager of the Windsor Hotel, had a car very early, so early that it was one steered by a steering-stick. He came down Wesley Street one day in this red car and the kids ran out from the schoolyard to see what the noise was. The car went on down the street, taking a traveller on his rounds, and ran into a telegraph pole.”
That car would have almost certainly arrived in Moncton by train. In the earliest days of the twentieth century, Intercontinental Railways (ICR) in particular didn’t see the newly invented automobile as an existential threat, but rather as a money-making opportunity.
Considering the average car owner was well off and wanted to travel, ICR offered to transport automobiles by train so tourists could “motor around” at their destinations.
As a railway hub for the ICR, Moncton’s political and business leaders instantly saw this as a potential source of tourist income for their community if they catered to these new automobile tourists.
The problem was the roads. ICR was transporting cars by trains because New Brunswick’s so-called highways were all but impassable for cars. Moncton’s city roads were, if anything, even worse, due to some baffling choices of paving materials, including metal, wood and concrete.
The earliest attempt to provide relief to wagons –and later cars– on Moncton’s perennially muddy roads was perhaps the most bizarre. According to Machum: “Londonderry iron slag was brought in … [and] spread liberally over Main Street and rolled down with steam rollers.”
As soon as Spring arrived the heavy iron pavement sunk beneath the mud and disappeared.
With iron slag roads turning out to be a failure, Moncton turned to another curious sort of road: wooden streets.
This was a complicated sort of street. According to Machum, “one description of this plan was that a first layer of heavy planks was laid on wooden beams and then on this cedar blocks about six inches in diameter were stood on end … the crevices among them were packed with sand.”
This worked surprisingly well for horses and carriages, which was the primary method of transportation at the time. The problem arose when parts of the blocks supporting the planks began to rot away. Then the boards themselves began to rise up, and soon every single board was on a different level from the other.
A new method of transportation became extremely popular in the late 1800s; the bicycle. According to Machum “It was quite an experience to ride a bicycle on such a street!”
In the absence of the provincial government not having any kind of centralised mechanism to build and maintain roads, curious lobbying groups appeared to fill the gap.
Perhaps surprisingly, it was the cyclists who often led the charge for improving roads in New Brunswick through founding “Good Roads Associations.” The Saint John branch, founded in 1892, went so far as to hire a lone employee to try and maintain the road linking that city to Fredericton.
Perhaps inspired by this, other locations also began to fill in the gaps left by the province by taking care of the roads themselves.
In his book 'Early Roads of New Brunswick,' Ronald Rees notes that “so great was the desire for good roads in the opening decades of the twentieth century that towns co-operated to work on unkempt stretches of the highways that connected them.”
Moncton and Shediac took this idea the furthest, cooperating to ensure there were high-quality (for the time) roads linking them, mainly with the goal of attracting tourists. The most notable example of this was the event known as “Good Roads Day.”
Partly a brilliant marketing gimmick to promote the automobile; partly a protest against the provincial government’s disinterest in building roads; partly a social outing for the wealthy elite who could afford cars back then; and partly a genuine effort to improve the quality of their roads; “Good Roads Day” put drivers to work fixing the roads all by themselves.
Early on, Moncton had focussed on a regional tourism pitch to attract the new “motor tourists.” It involved not only Moncton itself but also the ability to make trips to the great seaside resort town of Shediac.
In Spring, all the car drivers in Moncton loaded up with shovels and rakes and took to rebuilding the road. Their destination was, as it was phrased back then, to “get out to the shore” – to make a visit to seaside Shediac.
As they drove along they would stop and fill potholes and ruts in the road. Stones were raked off and flooded ditches were drained. Such was the atrocious state of the roads back then that many of the cars that set out “to get to the shore” that morning would get stuck before making it to their destination.
Their efforts were met with success. Tourists from the United States began to arrive in Moncton via the ICR with their cars to “motor around” Moncton and Shediac in the summers, providing a great economic boost to the region.
This foresight wasn't the case everywhere though; right across the Strait, PEI banned cars!
Presumably flush with American tourist dollars, in 1917 Moncton launched one last effort to pave the city's streets with something unconventional before eventually moving to asphalt in the 1920s. This time they paved the city’s streets with concrete.
