Elliott, Bruce, 2004-2005: Emigrant Recruitment by the New Brunswick Land Company: The Pioneer Settlers of Stanley and Harvey.

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The New Brunswick Company did not enjoy the advantage of lands scattered through the older settlements, and much of the most accessible land adjoining its territory, along the major rivers, had already been granted away.   Their York County purchase was to suffer similar disadvantages to the Huron and St Francis blocks from its comparative isolation and the Company's slowness to improve the roads.   The Company made a great deal of the fact that New Brunswick was much closer to Great Britain than was the Huron Tract, and published a map that dramatically demonstrated this ⁽⁵⁾.   But by the 1830s New Brunswick was proving a less attractive prospect for English immigrants than Canada, closer or not.   Given the inferior quality of much of the soil, the bulk of the York County purchase, too, would eventually be exploited for timber rather than field crops.

Chart of the Atlantic exhibiting the relative distances between the British North American colonies and the United Kingdom - notably the New Brunswick Land Company and Canada Company tracts. Source :   CIHM N.63916

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Just as the Canada Company established the towns of Guelph and Goderich, Ontario, and the British American Land Company the town of Sherbrooke, Quebec, so the New Brunswick Company spent £80,000 in the first few years in preparing two townsites 18 miles apart:   Stanley, on the Nashwaak 25 miles north of Fredericton, and Campbellton on the Miramichi (now Bloomfield Ridge) ⁽⁶⁾. Stanley was named for the Colonial Secretary in London, Campbellton for the colonial governor, Sir Archibald Campbell.   Company employees surveyed the townsites, built mills and houses, and cut through the roads, but less was accomplished than was promised in Company literature.   Of the two, only Stanley achieved a modest level of success as a magnet for settlers.

W.P. Kay, Clearing the Town Plot at Stanley, October 1834, part of a promotional publication released by the Land Company. Source: NA, C-40780

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(5) CIHM N.63916.

 

(6) R.F. Fellows, Community Placenames in New Brunswick, Canada (Fredericton: PANB, 1998), 31.