In early New Brunswick, a network of isolated rural taverns were stopping points for travelers, key places for new immigrants, and frequently hotspots for drunken debauchery.
The tavern was a convenient stopping place for weary travelers, where they could get food and drink, as well as a place to sleep and a stable for their horses.
The loose network of taverns for travelers existed long before roads ever did. Roads are relatively new in our province – long before that rivers were the roads.
New Brunswick’s greatest naturalist and historian, W. F. Ganong, wrote in 1899: “I doubt if anywhere else in the world is an equal extent of territory so completely watered by navigable streams, or whether in any other country canoe navigation was ever brought to such a pitch of perfection, or so exclusively relied upon for locomotion.”
The places where the rivers and streams did not connect, or where there were treacherous sections, were called portages. In these places one had to go through the frustrating process of taking out and carrying canoes and equipment through the forests to the next stream.
Though early Europeans were prone to complaining about the difficulties of the portage, they were actually following well worn paths. In his book ‘The Lost Tavern,’ detailing a French tavern in Miramichi in 1795, Kevin Gallant states that the Mi’kmaq and Woolastoq traveled these routes for over 2500 years, and that even today, many of our modern highways and settlements still follow these age-old portage routes.
The portage location became a place to camp and rest, and later on early French settlers were first established by the French, though many records of their locations -as well as the taverns themselves- were destroyed during the Expulsion of the Acadians.
These taverns would often be very isolated, though later towns might be built up around them. British traveler Sir James Alexander recorded that when he visited in 1844, Grand Falls only had five houses, one of which was a tavern.
Beginning in the 1830s there had been a major boom in the number of taverns, as New Brunswick was beginning to build a network of stagecoach roads linking some of its cities and towns.
Though the new stagecoach roads revolutionized transport, communication, and trade at the time, they were certainly not of the quality we would expect today. Getting from Fredericton to Miramichi was a 24 hour long drive over bone-jarringly rough conditions. Such long drives on such exhaustingly poor quality roads meant that travelers would want to stop and rest.
In her book ‘A Time There Was,’ Marion Gilcrest Reicker describes what was likely a nicer than average tavern called Todd’s Place, in Mill Cove on Lake Washademoak.
Curiously, while the stable was by the road, the tavern itself was on the opposite side of the lake from the road, meaning guests had to be paddled across.
Inside Todd’s Place, travelers would all eat together in a big common room, where they all sat at a single large table on long benches. Wet clothes were hung on a line over the large fireplace to dry.
At night the travelers would all sleep in one big bunk room at the back of the tavern. Often there were more travelers than beds, and so strangers would sleep together in the same bed until there was physically no space left. Those not lucky enough to fit into the beds would sleep wrapped in blankets on the benches in the common room.
In the late 1820s the government decided to begin instituting regulations and oversight for taverns.
One application to start a tavern in 1831 in West Jerusalem, which is now a ghost town located within Base Gagetown, was written by William Quinn. Quinn wrote that the tavern was necessary because he had “ frequently to travel ten to fifteen miles for the most trivial article,” which made him wish to “establish himself in the line of a grocer.”
Quinn added “for the further accommodation of the settlement [it] is desirous of selling liquors by the quantity so small as a pint.”
It was the drinking that had the government stepping in to regulate taverns.
Maritimers’ current reputation for drinking certainly pales in comparison to their ancestors’. In 1824 alone, the 74,000 people who lived in New Brunswick at the time -about the population of Fredericton today– imported 14,772 gallons of wine, 29,682 gallons of brandy or gin and a staggering 310,879 gallons of Maritimers’ favorite drink: rum.
All this drinking was causing social problems in the province, and taverns were getting the blame.
A 1837 counter-petition against a new tavern in Hampstead, Queens County, alludes to issues that came with taverns: “knowing the great injury a former tavern at the road end … was to a good many families in this Settlement, they pray that no tavern license would be granted there, nor in any of these back Settlements.”
When Sir James Alexander stayed in a Grand Falls tavern he found “rough lumberman having a drink that turned into a spree … [they] talked loud, sang, drank, and tried their strength by putting a heavy stone in front of the door.”
Alexander was so horrified at the scale of drinking in the taverns that he ended up temporarily swearing off alcohol for the remainder of his stay in the province.
Premier Samuel Tilley was a hardline leader of the Temperance Movement, and was opposed to alcohol and in 1854 passed an Act with new tavern regulations. The goal was to make them less for drinkers and more for travelers.
The Act would fine taverns 40 shillings for serving intoxicated patrons, demanded taverns all have at least three beds for travelers, set up an organization of tavern inspections to ensure compliance, and ordered all taverns to stop serving alcohol at 8pm. Intriguingly, the law also stipulated that taverns must carry “wholesome refreshments” as alternatives to rum, “such as beer.”
The Act didn’t work, and two years later the exasperated government banned alcohol completely in New Brunswick. This proved to be not only unpopular, but caused a massive drop in the government’s revenue, and was quickly repealed.
