The New Brunswick and Nova Scotia Land Company, organized in 1831 and
chartered in 1834, was the New Brunswick counterpart of Ontario's Canada
Company and Quebec's British American Land Company. Despite its name,
the Company appears not to have operated in Nova Scotia. All these corporations
exercised a responsibility, delegated by the colonial administration,
to open up and settle large tracts of land at the expense, and for the
profit, of their English shareholders. The attraction for the colonial
governments was that the companies provided a large infusion of capital
to executives locked in combat with their elected assemblies over the
control of other forms of colonial revenue. Always unpopular with elected
representatives, the companies found themselves at their mercy once
control of Crown lands passed, at British instigation, from executive
to legislature.
The New Brunswick Company purchased a tract of 589,000 acres in York
County north of Fredericton. The tract comprised all the lands in the
county north of the St John River and west of the Nashwaak and of the
portage road to the South West Miramichi (now Highway 8), less the most
accessible lands, which already had been granted away.
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