Bedeque. A Mace in the Sun

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Bedeque A Mace in the Sun By Robert C. Tuck Mhere are a bewildering number of Bedeques Centreville Bedeque, Central Bedeque, Lower Bedeque, North Bedeque but there is only one Bedeque Bay.

1 Bedeque A Mace in the Sun By Robert C. Tuck Mhere are a bewildering number of Bedeques Centreville Bedeque, Central Bedeque, Lower Bedeque, North Bedeque but there is only one Bedeque Bay. When human activity began in the Bedeque area it was the Bay, and the mouth of the Dunk River flowing into it, which was the focus of movement and settlement rather than the sunny farmlands and clumps of buildings that today suggest a multitude of Bedeques spread in haphazard sprawl across the red soil of southeastern Prince County. The origin of the name Bedeque is obscure. It may be a corruption of the Micmac "Eptek," meaning "the hot place." The Micmacs had a camping ground in the area at Maakpak (meaning "large bay") to the north where they were exposed to the cold winds and waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. On their journeys to the mainland they sailed their canoes up the small stream now called Rayner's Creek, portaged across the isthmus to Wilmot Creek, whence they paddled out into Bedeque Bay before making the bold dash across open water from Cape Traverse to Cape Tormentine. The more sheltered waters and shores of Bedeque Bay seemed wanner to the red men than those of the north shore, hence Eptek, "the hot place." The first Euopean settlers at Bedeque were refugee French Acadian farmers who fled Nova Scotia to escape the Anglo-French confrontation which intensified there after the War of the Austrian Succession of They wished to avoid being caught in the middle of the struggle, and thought that He St.-Jean, as the Island was then called, might be a safe haven since it was still French territory. However, the fate which in 1755 overtook their compatriots who remained in Nova Scotia, when they were deported by Governor Lawrence, befell the Island Acadians following the capture of Louisbourg by the British in 1758: they were rounded up by the conquerors and evacuated. There were 100 or so settlers at Bedeque who were removed in this fashion. Although many of the French buildings were razed by the British soldiers, several homes were still habitable a generation later when they were occupied temporarily in 1784 by new refugees who this time made permanent settlements United Empire Loyalists fleeing the republican rebellion in the American colonies to the south which had made them aliens in their own land. Some of these Loyalists had been impoverished by a year spent at Shelburne in an unsuccessful attempt to rebuild New York on a rocky inlet on Nova Scotia's Atlantic coast. Not all who first came to Bedeque remained: among those who did were William Wright, Jacob Silliker, John Murray, William Schurman, Thomas Hooper, John Baker, and Richard Robins. They settled on the French lands about the The doorway of the Alexander Anderson house, which may date from before Its builder, a Loyalist, arrived in Bedeque in He was an elder in the Presbyterian Church whose duties included visiting the "wayward" to admonish them for departing from the paths of righteousness; in 1811 the Reverend John Keir sent him to rebuke some at Bedeque who were guilty of "frolicking." He laid out the road from Kinkora to North River, and died in 1852 at the age of

c!^a^ Bowness's (formerly Hooper's) Corner, Centreville Bedeque. The store was originally a community hall in Lower Bedeque; when Bowness's store burned it was moved here to replace the lost building.

2 c!^a^ Bowness's (formerly Hooper's) Corner, Centreville Bedeque. The store was originally a community hall in Lower Bedeque; when Bowness's store burned it was moved here to replace the lost building. The old house in the sketch, the home of the Ralph Arsenault family, is owned by Elizabeth Murray. mouth of the Dunk River (named after George Montagu Dunk, the second Earl of Halifax) and built houses facing the water, which served them as a highway. The shores of Bedeque Bay in the years that followed saw many ships built to sail that highway, but it was English settlers rather than American loyalists who built them for the most part. The most prominent shipbuilding family in Bedeque was the Popes. They arrived in 1818, six sons of Thomas Pope of Plymouth, England, with a shipload of labourers to cut pine for the British market. Three of them were Wesleyan or Methodist preachers, and in addition to their ships they built a homestead and a meeting house. The site of the latter is marked today by the Bedeque cemetery, but the house was hauled across the ice to Summerside where it survives as a Church of Scotland chapel. One of Thomas's sons, Joseph, sired William Henry, who became a Father of Confederation, and James Colledge, who was three times Premier of Prince Edward Island and a member of the Dominion Cabinet. William Henry's son was secretary to and biographer of Sir John A. Macdonald, and ended his days as Sir Joseph Pope. George Leard, 16 The Bedeque area, as shown in Meacham's 1880 Atlas. Central Bedeque is here called Mt. Stowe.

The old John Howatt property (now owned by Dick Vantierk) is a landmark on the Lower Bedeque Road. A cairn to mark the site of the Pope family's shipyard stands across the road in front of the house.

3 The old John Howatt property (now owned by Dick Vantierk) is a landmark on the Lower Bedeque Road. A cairn to mark the site of the Pope family's shipyard stands across the road in front of the house. The old Robert Hooper place in Lower Bedeque, now the home of Brian MacDonald. Frederick Holland bought the place from Hooper, and it was afterwards the home of Reginald Forbes, his son-in-law. Reginald's son John, who is now the mayor of Summerside, grew up here. the historian of the Bedeque United Church, notes that the Popes "dropped...methodism somewhere along the road to worldly success." A pious visitor to Bedeque at the end of the 18th century described it as "profane and unsaved," but in the course of time the Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists arrived, in that order, to claim it for the Lord. While some of the first English speaking families were Quaker or Anglican, most were Presbyterian. The Reverend James MacGregor from Pictou preached in Bedeque in 1794, and a Presbyterian Church was built not long afterwards, perhaps before But it was the Methodists who became dominant in the community, perhaps because they were in the full tide of "enthusiasm" following the Methodist break with the Church of England after John Wesley's death in In 1792 an itinerant Methodist missionary, the Reverend William Grandin, preached "powerful disturbing words...until many were uneasy" (according to George Leard). Nathaniel Wright and his wife Nancy Lord were converted, and with their children and several others were formed into a "class," which later grew into the Bedeque Methodist Church. A notable ministry was that of the Reverend John B. Strong, who was guided through the woods to Bedeque by Jane Callbeck, 18-year-old daughter of Phillips Callbeck, a one-time Attorney General and Acting Governor of the Island whose descendants today conduct the largest retail business in the community. In the course of time the Presbyterians were centred in North Bedeque, the Methodists in Centreville, and the Baptists in Central Bedeque. Often in wintertime churchgoers passed one another going in opposite directions on the ice to their respective places of The Jesse Wright house (now the home of the Austin Gaudet family) at the Bedeque mills is about 150 years old. 17

4 Douglas Affleck's farm at Lower Bedeque was built by George Price about 1826, although it has undergone subsequent embellishment. The attic is as high as the first and second floors combined, and the old clapboards were handsawn in a pit. When they had to be replaced on one side of the building recently, Mr. Affleck had new ones milled in a special order rather than disfigure his old house with aluminum siding. The Jesse A. Wright house stands empty, vandalized and derelict on the bank of the Dunk River mouth at North Bedeque. It is one of the oldest houses in the district, with a double entrance, birch bark sheathing under the corner boards, and great squared tree trunks as floor joists. It is full of old six-panelled doors. Despite its present condition it could be reclaimed and restored as a summer home by someone with a little money and a love of heritage architecture. 18

5 The Lower Bedeque School. Lucy Maud Montgomery taught in this building, erected to replace an earlier structure which disappeared overnight. The young men of the community took it down under cover of darkness and hid its timbers under piles of hay in a nearby barn in order to encourage the elders of the community to make the decision to replace it with a more adequate building. worship, and older residents recall the scandal caused when families belonging to the Presbyterian and Methodist flocks intermarried. Today both belong to the United Church of Canada. The first Baptists were Scotch Baptists, but the Reverend Seth Harding organized them as "Regular Baptists" on Calvinistic principles in 1826 following a preaching visit the year before of the Reverend Charles Tupper (father of Sir Charles) from Nova Scotia. For many years Isaac Bradshaw was the local preacher in this Baptist chapel. Bedeque had its share of taverns and drinking places as well as churches. The earliest licenses to sell liquor in the community were issued in 1794 to Peter Maybey and Mary Brancombe, and Thomas Hooper's inn at Centreville offered bed, board, and liquor from 1830 to Later beer was brewed in Centreville by Dan Noonan, and Mrs. Orville Johnston remembers her father describing how on one occasion an old shoe was fished out of the beer barrel from which the villagers had been in the habit of slaking their thirst. Bedeque had one of the first branches of the Sons of Temperance on the Island. On July 24, 1850, almost 600 people attended a picnic to raise funds to build a Temperance Hall in Bedeque. A band the first ever heard in the community came from Charlortetown to adorn the event, and two Methodist preachers, the Reverend James Buckley and W.G. Strong, delivered sermons on the evils of drink. Both the Methodists and Presbyterians publicly rebuked members who got drunk, and if they were impenitent, suspended them from the "sealing ordinances" of the church. Early in the 1850s James Colledge Pope moved his business across Bedeque Bay to what was called Green's Shore, and triggered the commercial growth and settlement of Summerside. The growth of Summerside in the 1850s determined that Bedeque would not become a town but remain a rural place. Shipbuilding slowly declined, and Bedeque became what it has been primarily every since an agricultural community. The land was good, perhaps the best on the Island, and the farms made their owners prosperous. Secondary industry related to the needs and resources of the community for example, tanneries and grist, carding, and saw mills flourished. For many years farmers operated efficiently on small acreages; but as machines became more and more involved in human life, it was as impossible for small farms to provide an income capable of satisfying the needs of the farm families as it was for the community to supply machines of the sophistication required by the changing times. Farms became larger and the farm population declined. In our own time further changes have affected rural communities like Bedeque, notably school consolidation and the growth of corporate farming. In the early seventies Bedeque people put up a spirited fight against excessive school consolidation, and elementary schools survive in Centreville and Central Bedeque. None of the farmland in Lower Bedeque is in the hands of vertical integrators as yet, but the effects of corporate farming are evident in nearby districts. The cost of land, either to buy or rent, has increased faster than the rate of inflation, making it more difficult for farmers to expand their acreage or get into agriculture in the first place. Although Campbell and Burns, the Central Bedeque processor and corporate farmer, denies that it pays more than the current price for agricultural land, the respondents to a National Farmers' Union survey in the nearby Kensington area considered the ability of such firms to pay high prices for land contributed to its escalating price. One farmer said that 75% of the farms in his community had disappeared in the 20 years previous to 1978 and that 75% of the land on these farms was now owned by large vertical integrators. Fully 77% of those surveyed did not think that large food processors should also grow the products they market. Homes on the farms taken over by the corporate farmers are being left vacant or are occupied by persons working in distant places. On the corporate farms the land is being worked by wage earners, often from outside the community, "who are not interested in or proud of the community." (N.F.U. Land Study, p. 35) It is evident that the trend to bigness works against the small family farm and the small rural community. One Lower Bedeque farmer with whom I spoke observed, "Urban demand for cheap food has cost the rural community dearly." As more and more old farmsteads disappear, the rural population gravitates toward the towns, returning only to summer cottages which sprout along the shoreline. Perhaps the urban Islander needs to think deeply about the countryside and see it as important for more than recreational purposes or the place of origin of the french fries he has with his Big Mac. It is also the place of family farms and small communities which in the past have 19

produced human beings of character, independence, and achievement. Without farming communities like Bedeque, Prince Edward Island would be a different and poorer place.

6 produced human beings of character, independence, and achievement. Without farming communities like Bedeque, Prince Edward Island would be a different and poorer place. JI^TSUJ The North Bedeque Presbyterian Church (now United), built in The spire is a little shorter than it used to be after having been struck by lightning and rebuilt. Sources and Acknowledgements George A. Leard's Historic Bedeque: The Loyalists at Work and Worship in Prince Edward Island was an important source of information for this article, but I learned that it ought not to be used uncritically. Land Study, a Canada Works Project sponsored by the National Farmers' Union (Spring 1978) was also useful. I am indebted to Mrs. Orville Johnston, Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Affleck, Douglas MacFarlane, Edwin MacFarlane, Arnold Henderson, Mr. and Mrs. Hammond Bowness, Allan Rankin, Ian Robertson, and several others. Unfortunately, I was not able to include in this article all I learned about Bedeque, and I apologize to all those whose interesting forbears or properties have been done less than justice here. 4e3 (This is the second of a series of illustrated articles on Island towns and villages by Robert C. Tuck. See The Island Magazine, Number Four, "Georgetown: The Town That Time Forgot.) The Methodist Church in Centreville Bedeque (now United), built in The hall (right) was built later, but care was taken to make it harmonize with the original building. Plate glass doors have been installed in the entry in the tower, which is an exact replica of that built in Tryon in 1881 to a design by William C. Hurris. 20

7 Callbeck's store at Central Bedeque serves a large area and demonstrates that the country store can survive in an era of urban shopping malls and easy transportation. The original part of the building (on the right) was a tailor shop which was moved across the road and joined to a grocery store already on the site. To the left is the Campbell and Burns plant. m^l^m to-*;',h y?&* xy ^M- J <"e IZ^J^ ' % A view of Centreville Bedeque from the Lower Bedeque Road. 21

PANEL #1. The Early Years. primary text

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