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By Ross Graves
Upper Stewiacke
On Sunday, August 3, 1980, the Stewiacke Valley Bicentennial
Homecoming Week begins with a church service at Middle Stewiacke. |
Before the service, a sort of prelude to
it, there will be re-enacted the arrival of the first family to make
their home in this valley two hundred years ago - William Kennedy, his
wife Janet, and their seven children.
The family will be represented by nine people from
different parts of the valley, with different surnames, who have this in
common: all of them are descended from one or another of those seven
children - as are many valley residents, perhaps one out of six.
After the church service a newly-erected cairn will be dedicated in
memory of the first settlers in general and of William Kennedy in
particular. It is his only memorial in the valley, for he has no
gravestone; there is no way to tell even which cemetery he was buried
in, the one in Middle Stewiacke or in Upper.
When William and Janet came to what is now Middle Stewiacke in 1780,
their children were nearly grown up: they had a son 20, a daughter 18,
sons 16 and 14, twin daughters 12, and a son 10 - a family large enough
and old enough to cope with the adventures of settling in the
wilderness. For a year they lived alone in this valley. In 1781 another
settler, Samuel Teas, brought his family here and built his log house
across the river from them. The next year, David Fisher and Simeon
Whidden came with wives and young children and settled a little further
up the river, and the year after that, 1783, Matthew Johnson and his
bride followed the river several miles upstream to become the first
settlers in what is now Upper Stewiacke; and then settler followed
settler into the valley until the Kennedys had neighbours at several
points along the river. The river was their chief means of travel then,
before roads could be established; all the earliest grants of land
fronted on it, and all the earliest settlers built their houses near it
until the great freshet of 1792 flooded them out and taught them to
build on higher ground.
William and Janet came here from Truro. Twenty years before as a young
couple with a baby son, they had come to Truro along with the families
who first settled that place, families who came to Truro from New
Hampshire, to New Hampshire from northern Ireland and (a few generations
back) to northern Ireland from Scotland. William Kennedy's name appears
on the original grant for Truro township. The lot which he drew for a
house lot and built his dwelling on lay between the present Park and Elm
Streets in downtown Truro. (Note in 2003 - the previous Nova Scotia
Liquor Commission outlet partly occupies this site.) A hundred years
ago, Tom Miller, Colchester County's first historian, identified this
site by naming its best known building then, the town's Temperance Hall.
T
heir daughter Elizabeth, who was born the fall of 1761, is considered
the first child born in Truro after it was settled by the British. Two
more sons were born while they were there, James and Robert. In 1768
William sold his house and land in Truro and moved to Pictou, which was
then a very small, very new settlement: this was five years before the
"Hector" came over with settlers from Scotland. William built, in 1769,
the first sawmill in Pictou County, which was also the first frame
building in Pictou. It stood at the mouth of what has since been called
Saw Mill Brook, near the present P.E.I. ferry terminal at Caribou.
During the eight years William and Janet lived in Pictou County the
twins, Margaret and Jane, were born, and the youngest child, John. In
1776 William sold out in Pictou and brought the family back to Truro,
and four years later, in 1780, they came to the Stewiacke Valley.
A large tract of land at the lower end of the valley had been set aside
for a tribe of Micmacs who had camped there at certain times of the year
as far back as anyone could remember. The trace on which William and his
family settled lay on the east side of this Indian grant. The site of
the original house they built there has long been forgotten. It was
situated by the river somewhere on the farm now occupied by Ralph
Campbell - or possibly on the Doug Taylor place which adjoins it - both
farms are part of a 500 acre lot for which William received an official
grant six years after he came to the valley. The second house was built
on the upland, probably south of the resent buildings on the Campbell
farm.
"He continued to reside on this farm," says the Tom Miller book,
"enduring the hardships of settling in the woods, until the infirmities
of old age came upon him". About 1796 he divided the property - giving
the east portion (where Charles Crouse farmed) to Robert; the middle
portion with homestead (where Ralph Campbell lived) to James; and the
west portion (the Doug Taylor place) to John - and went to live with his
daughter in South Branch.
William's oldest son, also named William,
did not live to receive his share of the property. In February, 1792,
there was to be a wedding in the family. William Jr. who was shortly to
be married himself to a daughter of a settler in the Musquodoboit
valley, started for Musquodoboit to invite her and her family to the
wedding. He followed the river up toward the head of the valley,
intending to cross over there to Upper Musquodoboit, but when he got up
about where the South Branch flows into the Stewiacke, he broke through
the ice and was drowned. (Two years afterward his youngest brother
married the same girl.) A year and a half later the oldest Kennedy
daughter, Elizabeth, who had married and settled at the Branch, lost
husband and son by drowning, under circumstances that were never fully
understood. It was to this daughter's home that William went from Middle
Stewiacke. When she married the second time, in 1805, he went to live
with his son James, who by then had sold the homestead and moved to
Upper Stewiacke village where (or near where) Ralph Fisher now lives.
William died there in October 1816, aged over 80; Janet died there also
in 1813 or 1814.
Two hundred years ago then, there was one household in the entire
Stewiacke Valley. Today there are some 460 households here, and the
inhabitants of over one hundred of them can trace their family tree back
to that pioneer valley family. The rest of this chapter illustrates this
by means of a Family Tree. In order to keep this from becoming too long,
the only children in a family who are listed are the ones needed to
trace the record down to someone living in the valley today. A complete
list of all the descendants of William and Janet, living and dead, would
probably fill a book.
Note: This
account is taken from Stories of the Stewiacke Valley, a collection
published during the Stewiacke Valley Bicentennial celebrations in
1980. |
