Thread by @robhoadley

Here’s a fun little story about how this map made KC Irving the largest landowner in New Brunswick.

Most of the lines on this map were built between 1860 and 1900 during the railroad boom. The Colony of New Brunswick initially began seeding railroad investment by offering cash.

The Province offered $10,000 per mile of completed railroad. This quickly turned out to be a mistake and the government ran out of cash. Fredericton did have plenty of something else on hand: land.

Right around Confederation, Alexander “Boss” Gibson wanted to get timber from his leased timber rights in the northwestern part of the province to his new sawmill in South Devon. He negotiated with the government to build a new railroad.

The province, being cash poor, instead subsidized with land. The railway would be given 10,000 acres of Crown land for every mile they built. The New Brunswick Land and Railway Company was eventually granted over a million acres as they built the railroad from Devon to Edmundston

Gibson sold out in the 1880s, but the railway itself was fairly successful. It ended up leasing the St Andrews & Quebec Railroad (which ran from St Andrews to Richmond Corner). It also bought the Western Extension of the European & North American from Vanceboro to Saint John

This growing rail network drew the attention of the Canadian Pacific. The CPR wanted a route to the ice free port of Saint John and the NB Railroad was a perfect fit. They leased the entire NB Railroad for 990 years in 1890.

While the railroad was leased to the CPR, the company retained ownership of all that land. They leased it to various mills around the province. One leaseholder, JD Irving Ltd, saw the value in the land owned by the railroad holding company. They negotiated a deal to buy it out.

The CPR continued to lease the railway while JD Irving now owned outright the land and the railroad right of way.

JD Irving then bought out another holding company, the New Brunswick and Canada Railway and Land Company.

This company held the land grants of the old St Andrews & Quebec Railroad, over 1.6 million acres across Western New Brunswick. The British owners of the holding company sold pieces of land to various mills before selling the remaining 700,000 acres to JD Irving in 1945.

Flash forward again another 80 years and these lands are at the centre of the Wolastoqey Nation land claims. These First Nations claim that the province had no right to give away that land 150 years ago.

cbc.ca/amp/1.6267718

The CPR shut down operations in New Brunswick in the early 1990s. The tracks of the old New Brunswick Railway were ripped up. In Fredericton you can still walk the old route from the Walking Bridge across the Northside out to Douglas.

Outside Fredericton the abandoned right of way becomes the NB Trail. It’s a relic of our railroading past.

The land grants, given to various railroad companies in the 19th century in the hopes of kickstarting development in New Brunswick, instead helped build an industrial empire in the 20th. JD Irving’s freehold lands (dark green on this map) are almost entirely those old grants