. Bathurst had been the location of the annual
Mi'kmaq summer coastal community of Nepisiguit prior to European settlement. Europeans first reached the shores of the
Baie des Chaleurs when in 1534 it was named by
Jacques Cartier. Early
settlers from France came to the area in the 17th century in what became part of the
colony of
Acadia. In 1607
Samuel de Champlain sailed into the
Miramichi, Jean Jacques Enaud, who hailed from the
French Basque Country, was granted in 1638 the seignory at the southeastern gap of the harbor later named Alston Point. Remark is made on
William Francis Ganong's map of Bathurst Harbour, depicted here at left, of the residence of Nicolas Denys and the seignory of Gobin. Little is known about the region between the death of Nicholas Denys in 1688 and the
Treaty of Utrecht (1713), whereby
Louis XIV ceded the territory of Acadia to
Anne, Queen of Great Britain. Although it was marked as an inlet, the Nepisiguit river was not noted in a British map dated 1744, although by 1755
Thomas Jefferys illustrates the "Nipisiki River" and "Nipisighit Bay". Historians remark the
Battle of the Restigouche in June 1760 (one of the final events in the
Seven Years' War) in the
Baie des Chaleurs, and various other incidents as the colony of
Nouvelle France expired. According to
Gamaliel Smethurst, a trader who supposedly was permitted there by
Governor Murray, the British attempted to remove the
remaining scattered Acadians from the Nepisiguit basin and
Caraquet in late October 1761. Following the formal fall of this part of Acadia to British control in 1763 by the
Treaty of Paris, the
region saw the arrival of numerous
English and
Scottish settlers, eager to exploit the region's natural resources. Some grants were rewards for good and loyal service with the King's arms: for example, Captain Arthur Goold of the
Royal Marines was granted 2,000 acres on both sides of the Nepisiguit River mouth on 9 September 1784 in what is now known as East Bathurst.
1800s One of the Scotsmen was Hugh Munro, who arrived in 1794. In 1807 Munro was appointed a justice of the peace and judge of the Inferior Court of Common Pleas for
Northumberland County, It seems that the great
1825 Miramichi Fire had a significant impact on the fortunes of Bathurst, for the devastation of 6,000 acres forced northwards many displaced people. This incident was the reason for the subdivision of two new counties, Kent and Gloucester, out of what had been Northumberland County, and in 1826, St. Peter's harbour was renamed in honour of the Colonial Secretary,
Lord Bathurst. The first St. George's Anglican Church was built in 1825 and consecrated as a place of worship in 1836. The Anglican burial ground near the old post office dates to 1823. The more recent St. George's church, which was built in 1864, on King avenue below St. Andrew Street is a nice example of
Carpenter Gothic architecture. The
community, which up to 1828 had been named St. Peters,
Joseph Cunard, attracted by the county's timber resources, set up a branch of his family's shipbuilding firm here at some time after the great fire in Miramichi of 1825. By 1828, he was elected to the
Legislative Assembly of New Brunswick as representative for
Northumberland County, and was variously a justice of the peace and served on the board of health. Joseph's brother
Samuel Cunard was also a landowner in Bathurst. Cunard purchased the Gould grant in 1837 and his production of ships in Bathurst harbor began in earnest. The age of timber ships began its decline in 1848 with the 1848 launch of
Brunel's
SS Great Britain, the revolutionary iron-hulled steamship. This event caused Joseph's shipbuilding firm to founder, and with it went New Brunswick's economy. Samuel went on to manage the
Cunard Line. A shipbuilder who followed in Cunard's wake by the name of John O'Brien built more than 60 ships from 1858 to 1877. Ship's carpenters, spar and mast makers, adzemen and other tradesmen were paid up to five dollars per day. It was not unusual during the heyday of Bathurst shipbuilding to see anywhere from five to fifteen ships in various stages of construction along the waterfront. A stagecoach service between Bathurst and Chatham was launched by James Foran in 1832. Others, like James Waitt, James MacBeath, William Branch and John Rennie soon opened competition. "
Delirium tremens occasioned by the abuse of ardent spirits" caused at least one untimely death in 1831. So it was in 1832 that a
Temperance Society was organized in New Bandon, a small town east of Bathurst. Upwards of 50 persons attended. The first full-time local doctor, Sam Bishop, arrived in 1833; a contemporary of his was known as Robert Gordon. Bishop and Gordon would conduct vaccination clinics throughout the county in 1841 when an epidemic of
small pox struck. The third doctor to set up a local practice (but not until 1871) was Gideon Mitchell Duncan. The Gloucester County Grammar School, later known as the Bathurst Grammar School, opened its doors on 1 October 1835 under the direction of Charles Lloyd. He provided room and board for 24 pounds per annum if the student was under 10 years of age; older students were charged two pounds more. At least two private schools were active elsewhere in the county during the same era. The town map of 1836 shows "public landing" government docks at the water end of the four downtown streets, Douglas, King, Murray, and Black (now Main), as well as the western end of Water (now Main) Street. The town extends as far south as Munro Street;
glebe lots were located between King and Murray, south of Munro. In the mid-19th century Gloucester County, settlers who petitioned the province for 50 or 100-acre parcels of land were required in order to obtain their grant: to homestead this land for three years, that is, to build a house on it and eventually to cultivate four acres on it.
Charles Lanman wrote in 1856 of fly fishing for salmon in the Nepisiguit that "It has not its superior in the world. It is a marvelous river." The hire in that era of a river guide with expert local knowledge cost one dollar a day. For this sum, the employers would be transported with their bags to the salmon pools, would have their meals cooked for them, flies tied for them, rods repaired for them, and clothes washed for them. Presumably, their tents would be pitched for them as well.
Samuel Napier, who had grown up in Bathurst, discovered on 14 August 1857 the 145-pound gold "Napier Nugget" somewhere in the Australian state of
Victoria. He later
represented Gloucester County in the Legislative Assembly of New Brunswick from 1870 to 1874, The estimated population of the Parish of Bathurst in 1847, the year before the bankruptcy of Joseph Cunard, was 2,605. By 1871 it had apparently shrunk to 600. One report from 1851 states that 2,000 tons of
hay; 3,500 bushels of
wheat; 1,500 bushels of
barley; 16,700 bushels of
oats, 700 bushels of
buckwheat; and 10 bushels of
Indian corn were produced in the area. including especially the American seaboard states; shipments of lumber, deals or
laths were common enough to Manhattan NY. In the 19th century, men were eager to fell trees in the forest around Bathurst all winter long from sunup to sundown (Sundays excepted) for eight to ten dollars a month. Timber camps typically housed 50 men, who were each employed in one of several job descriptions. The telephone was but a distant dream, and weekends were spent at the camp. Spare time was kept to a minimum, but fiddlers and other musicians developed nonetheless by dint of isolation. The population of the Parish of Bathurst in 1861 was 3,771 souls, of whom 292 were farmers, and 1,071 were children between the ages of six and sixteen. Eighty years before the introduction of mandatory attendance, only 483 of these attended school. Agriculture was the primary occupation of the denizens, and potatoes were the crop of choice. There were one hydraulic grist mill, and one saw mill. The Anglican faith counted 569 devotees, the Presbyterian 573, the Methodist 241, and the Roman Catholic 2,371. The Annual Report of the Department of Fisheries for 1868 lists a so-called "Marine Hospital" in Bathurst, and the place of work for a Fisheries Officer. Bathurst once had a fish processing plant. Navigation in this County consisted of the carrying of wood, fish and grindstones from Bathurst to Britain, ports of the Dominion, Newfoundland, Miquelon, the United States, South America and Italy. In the wood trade, Bathurst employed in 1868 vessels of from 50 to 1,200 tons. The beacons at that time were unlit, a cause of some concern. In 1871 Bathurst had a population of 600. Bathurst Grammar School became graded in 1874. Hollywood film actor
Sam de Grasse was born here in 1875. The opening of the
Intercolonial Railway of Canada in 1876 (shown at the left hand side in the Ganong map) provided a fast connection from the port of Bathurst to the rest of North America which was essential for developing the region's principal industries in
forestry and
zinc mining. For example, the
St. Lawrence Lumber Co., which is depicted in the Ganong map at the mouth of the
Nepisiguit River, was managed in the late 19th century by
Kennedy Francis Burns of
Miramichi.
W.J. Kent opened his eponymous department store in 1884 on Main Street. In 1886, after a fire had destroyed its Temperance Hall, the
Roman Catholic Church began construction of what is now known as the
Sacré-Coeur Cathedral. The
diocese of Chatham was removed to Bathurst in 1938, and what had been up til then a church now became a cathedral.
1900s Even as late as 1900, the Sacred Heart Academy had outdoor toilets; although the date of sanitary service installation at the Academy is unknown. The imposing county courthouse and jail at St. Patrick Street—built from the same Connolly (Nepisiquit) quarry granite as other official buildings of the period—dates from 1900. This replaced an earlier, and more modest, wood-frame building. The jail function has been decommissioned for some years, in favour of the provincial facility at
Dalhousie. In 1904 Bathurst was a seaport, a port of entry on the
Intercolonial Railway and the
Caraquet and Gulf Shore Railway and a town with a post office, 35 stores, six hotels, a steam sawmill, a shingle mill, a flour mill, three fish freezers, two carriage factories, a printing shop, three churches and a population of 3,000. That year, John P. Leger formed a private venture called the Bathurst Electric and Water Power Company, with aim to erect and operate at Tetagouche River Falls a hydro-electric plant. Electricity had arrived in Bathurst, twenty-two years after the
Pearl Street Station had illuminated New York. The
Northern New Brunswick and Seaboard Railway can lay claim to be the railway company with the fewest miles of standard gauge track in history. The province empowered it in 1904 to lay track between Nepisiguit Junction and Grand Falls, a distance of 16 miles, to serve the short-lived Drummond Iron Mines. It would serve, for several years from 1920, to ferry construction materials to the (Nepisiguit) Grand Falls hydroelectric power dam. The
Annie R. plied her trade between Bathurst, Carron Point and Youghall Beach early in the 20th century (before private motorized transport became the norm) under the command of Jack Stever. The return fare from Bathurst to either of the points was a quarter. She was equipped with a steam boiler, was 36 feet long with a beam of eight feet and built in Bathurst. Owned by John Rennie, then foreman of the Caraquet Railway, the boat was built in George Eddy's mill by Joe Stackhouse of Saint John while he was engaged in the construction of the Nepisiguit Lumber Co. sawmill. In 1911,
James Hamet Dunn, who was born in West Bathurst in 1874, returned to Bathurst to endow its first hospital, on the Riverside Drive grounds of what was once a Doctor's office. It burned to the ground in 1917, and an expanded 35-bed structure was rebuilt in its place. The hospital eventually would grow to 60 bed capacity, and house a school of nursing. Damaged by fire in January 1951, the Dunn Hospital would pass into collective memory. Bathurst was incorporated as a town in 1912, following a poll of ratepayers and property holders conducted on 30 May that year in which a majority vote of 195 to 54 determined the outcome. The first election occurred on 11 September, and the budget for the first year was fixed at $8 million. The town of Bathurst's first mayor was
Patrick J. Burns, who has a street (along Coronation Park) named after him. The civic expansion happened just prior to the closure in 1913 of the decade-old Drummond Mines Limited iron mine at the
Bathurst Mining Camp. The arrival of water and sewer service to individual residences occurred in 1915, The Drummond Mine property was eventually acquired by the
Dominion Steel and Coal Company, who operated it more successfully. In 1989, the company was sold to
Stone Container Corporation of Chicago, Illinois who renamed it Stone Consolidated Inc.
Herman Good, by then a corporal in the
Royal Highlanders, earned a
Victoria Cross in the
Battle of Amiens on 8 August 1918. A man employed by the Bathurst Company Limited to saw shingles could earn $1 an hour during the 1920s. By the height of the depression in 1933 a project to pave Main Street paid the same worker $2 a day.
Peter Veniot, the owner since 1891 of Bathurst's French-language newspaper was the first Acadian premier of the province of New Brunswick. He succeeded upon resignation
Walter Foster as Premier in 1923, after a varied career in provincial government and as a civil servant. As Minister of Public Works in the Foster cabinet, Veniot was responsible for the creation of the New Brunswick Electric Power Commission, latterly
NB Power. He was a supporter of the
Maritime Rights Movement, which advocated more power for the Maritime provinces in Canadian confederation. His government was defeated in the 1925 provincial election, and he went on to become a Minister in the cabinet of
Mackenzie King. All that remains of the newspaper which for a time he owned—the
Courier des Provinces Maritimes—is a nameplate on its building at 174 St. Andrew Street, which was latterly converted to a rooming house. In 1921 the
College Sacre-Coeur, a Roman Catholic residential high school for Acadians, was relocated to Bathurst from its previous home in
Caraquet. The anglophone
Bathurst High School was founded in 1926, with the closure of the Grammar School which had outgrown its premises on St. Andrew Street. Bathurst Harbour was a busy place early in the Twentieth century. One might find schooners or ships in port, likely as not to board grindstones from the Reid firm, or milled lumber. Tugboats were employed to haul quarried limestone, or timber, which floated behind them between booms, from the
Gaspé Peninsula. A steel tug, the
Ste. Anne, in one trip could haul as many as 6,000 cords to its home at the pulp mill. She measured 135 feet with a beam of 29 feet and a draft of 16 feet making 465 tons. She was powered by a 1,200 horsepower coal-fired steam engine. The
Francis Huntley, a wooden tug, was owned by a partnership between the Gloucester Lumber Company and White & Rogers Co, and was used to boom timber from the mouth of the Bass River to a mill at White's Wharf. A sanatorium for the care of tuberculosis patients was opened in May 1931. Named
Our Lady of Lourdes of the Lady Dunn Institution, it was endowed by
Sir James Dunn (as he then was called) and his wife. It was entrusted by deed to the
Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph, and located at Vallee Lourdes just north of the town on a 1,000 acre farm which today houses the
Chaleur Regional Hospital. The village bridge, which was badly in need of repair, was reconstructed at the height of
Great Depression by the province. Sail power was employed for commercial purposes even as late as the 1930s for shipments whose origin was Bathurst, such as lumber. For several years during the 1940s, Bathurst was home to
Louis Robichaud, while he studied at the College Sacre-Coeur, in order to study for the
Juvénat Saint-Jean-Eudes. He demurred from the priestly vocation and, after a period at
Laval University, instead studied law by correspondence at
UNB while he articled at a Bathurst law firm. He met the woman who later became his wife in 1950 here at a wedding.
Princess Elizabeth, as she then was, visited Bathurst on her cross-Canada tour in 1951. The same year saw the installation of an artificial ice surface at the hockey barn near the paper mill: a levy was voted for this purpose at the special meeting of Town Council on 11 September, which followed a plebiscite on the issue. In April 1954, a new 80-foot antenna broadcast CHSJ signals to Bathurst from New Brunswick's only television station in Saint John. From 1958 onwards, the francophone CHAU station would broadcast on Channel 5 from its transmitter on Mount St. Joseph near
Carleton, Quebec. Radio came to Bathurst in 1955, on CKBC run by the Bathurst Broadcasting Company. Sacred Heart University awarded "local boy made good" Sir James Dunn an honorary Social Science doctorate in May 1954. The institution had been granted the power to confer degrees by a 1940 Act of Parliament, which lasted until in 1974 the Board of Directors transferred control to the provincial government of
Richard Bennett Hatfield, and it became known as the Bathurst Community College. Immature students and malcontented professors had in effect forced this change on the Board. The fill for the Queen street causeway was obtained from the excavations of the lower reservoir. The Town of Bathurst provided one third of the funds, while the government of
Hugh John Fleming provided the other two thirds. The project, which begun in 1955, took two years to complete.
Edward Byrne, KC, who had been Mayor of Bathurst from April 1949 to April 1951, was asked to chair the
Royal Commission on Finance and Municipal Taxation in New Brunswick in 1960 by Robichaud, who then was Premier. He completed his report on November 4, 1963, and Robichaud later used his work to justify monumental changes in how the province is run. A petition was presented to the provincial government on 15 March 1960 to request the transformation of the town into a city, after an affirmative vote was produced by ratepayers within the town and outlying districts. Construction of the present airport near South Tetagouche was begun in 1964 as a project funded by the Town of Bathurst and Gloucester county municipalities. Lights were installed along the 4,000 by 75 foot paved runway in 1968. Bathurst was meanwhile incorporated as a city, the province's sixth, hunters were dismayed because the increased size of the city meant, ipso facto, that they were expropriated. In 1972, the Bathurst Alpine Papermakers won the
Hardy Cup, defeating The Rosetown Red Wings 3–0 at the old Bathurst Arena. The Hardy cup was the Canadian national Intermediate "A" ice hockey championship from 1967 until 1984. The area of the City in 1978 was , while the taxable area was ; the city counted 154 people as employees. The
mill rate was 1.0123, the number of water meters was 2,480, and the population was 16,301. The Herman J. Good V.C Branch No.18 Royal Canadian Legion War Museum (established 1956) was designated in December 2005 a local historic place. On the evening of 27 March 2015, the Munro St. home of the Bathurst Agricultural Society—which had celebrated its 125th anniversary the previous year—was destroyed by fire. The society had been formed on 3 May 1853 to assist farmers by providing education, seeds and purebred livestock, and in as of 2014 sold a variety of agricultural-related products including livestock feed. On the evening of 27 November 2015, a fire destroyed four historic commercial buildings at the corner of Main Street and King Avenue. Fifty people in apartments above the stores lost everything and prominent office space was destroyed, including buildings that housed Birds Eye View pet store, Au Cafe Gourmet, local fabric store Christie's, the old stone-faced Bank of Montreal, and a wine bar. All the animals in the pet store perished, and electricity service was temporarily suspended to about 450
NB Power customers in the area. Mayor Stephen Brunet said it was a busy and successful corner: "Every building was part of the history of downtown and there for many, many years. It's going to be a big hole in downtown." The previous week, an abandoned building down the street on King Avenue was destroyed by fire, causing Mayor Brunet concerns. The Downtown Bathurst Revitalization Corporation and the local chapter of the
Canadian Red Cross were active in the efforts to support the afflicted. The fire was believed to have started at the back of the pet shop. On 5 August 2016, 53-year-old Perry Kinsman was arrested and charged with one count of arson after over nine months of investigation. On January 1, 2023, Bathurst annexed parts of the
local service districts of
the parish of Bathurst, Big River,
New Bandon-Salmon Beach, and
North Tetagouche. The names of communities in the annexed areas remain in use for address purposes. ==Economy==