In the course of a year or two after the arrival of the Loyalists the greater portion of the Acadians living on the St. John river above Fredericton removed—either from choice or at the instigation of government—to Madawaska, Caraquet and Memramcook. A few, however, remained, and there are today at French Village, in York county, about 31 families of Acadian origin numbering 149 souls, and 17 families in addition reside at the Mazerolle settlement not far away. The most common family name amongst these people is Godin; the rest of the names are Mazerolle, Roy, Bourgoin, Martin and Cyr. The influences of their environment can hardly be said to have had a beneficial effect upon these people, few of whom now use the French language. And yet the fact remains that from the time the valley of the River St. John was first parcelled out into seigniories, in the year 1684, down to the present day—a period of 220 years—the continuity of occupation of some portion of the soil in the vicinity of St. Ann’s has scarcely been interrupted, and the records of the mission on the River St. John may be said to have been continuous for about the same time. The missionaries as a rule spoke well of the people of their charge. Danielou said that there were 116 Acadian inhabitants in 1739 and that Monsieur Cavagnal de Vaudreuil, governor of Trois Rivieres, was “Seigneur de la paroisse d’Ekoupag.” He claims as a special mark of divine favor that in the little colony there was “neither barren woman nor child deformed in body or weak in intellect; neither swearer nor drunkard; neither debauchee nor libertine, neither blind, nor lazy, nor beggar, nor sickly, nor robber of his neighbor’s goods.” One would almost imagine that Acadia was Arcadia in the days of Danielou.
It may be well, whilst speaking of the remarkable continuity of the French occupation of the country in the vicinity of St. Anns, to state that after Chapter VII. of this history had been printed the author chanced to obtain, through the kindness of Placide P. Gaudet, some further information relating to the brothers d’Amours, the pioneer settlers of this region.
The brothers d’Amours, Louis, Mathieu and Rene, were residents on the St. John as early at least as the year 1686, when we find their names in the census of M. de Meulles. A document of the year 1695[94] shows that their claims to land on the St. John river were rather extravagant and hardly in accord with the terms 251 of their concessions. Louis d’Amours, sieur de Chauffours, claimed as his seigniory at Jemseg a tract of land extending two leagues along the St. John, including both sides of the river two leagues in depth. He also claimed another and larger seigniory, extending from a point one league below Villebon’s fort at the Nashwaak four leagues up the river with a depth of three leagues on each side. His brother Rene d’Amours, sieur de Chignancourt, lived on this seigniory a league or so above the fort.
The statement made in a previous chapter that Rene d’Amours was unmarried and lived the life of a typical “coureur de bois” is incorrect. The census of 1698 shows that he had a wife and four children. His wife was Charlotte Le Gardeur of Quebec. The names of the children, as they appear in the census, are Rene aged 7, Joseph 5, Marie Judith 2, and Marie Angelique 1. While fixing his residence in the vicinity of Fort Nashwaak, Rene d’Amours was the seignior of a large tract of land on the upper St. John extending “from the Falls of Medoctek to the Grand Falls,” a distance of more than ninety miles. After the expiration of eleven years from the date of his grant, Rene d’Amours seems to have done nothing more towards its improvement than building a house upon it and clearing 15 acres of land. Even in the indulgent eyes of the Council at Quebec, of which his father was a member, this must have appeared insufficient to warrant possession by one man of a million acres of the choicest lands on the St. John river. He made rather a better attempt at cultivating the land near his residence upon his brother’s seigniory, for the census of 1695 shows that he had raised there 80 minots [bushels] of corn, 16 minots of peas, 3 minots of beans. He had 3 horned cattle, 12 hogs and 60 fowls; two men servants and one female servant; three guns and a sword.
The seigniory of Mathieu d’Amours, sieur de Freneuse, lay between the two seigniories of his brother Louis at Jemseg and Nashwaak, extending a distance of seven leagues and including both sides of the river. Both Louis and Mathieu made far greater improvements than Rene, having a large number of acres cleared and under cultivation, together with cattle and other domestic animals. They had a number of tenants and eight or ten servants.
The census of 1695 contains the following interesting bit of information: “Naxouat, of which the Sr. Dechofour is seignior, is where the fort commanded by M. de Villebon is established. The Sr. Dechofour has there a house, 30 arpents [acres] of land under cultivation and a Mill, begun by the Sr. Dechofour and the Sr. de Freneuse.”
The reference to a mill, built by the brothers Louis and Mathieu d’Amours in the neighborhood of Fort Nashwaak, may serve to explain the statement of Villebon in 1696, that he had caused planks for madriers, or gun platforms, to be made near the fort.[95] This mill at any rate ante-dates by the best part of a century the mill built by Simonds & White at St. John in 1767 and that built by Colonel Beamsley Glacier’s mill wrights at the Nashwaak in 1768. Doubtless it was a very primitive affair, but it sawed lumber, and was in its modest way the pioneer of the greatest manufacturing industry of New Brunswick at the present day.
Among the contemporaries of the brothers d’Amours on the River St. John were Gabriel Bellefontaine, Jean Martel,[96] Pierre Godin, Charles Charet, Antoine Du Vigneaux, and Francois Moyse. The author is indebted to Placide P. Gaudet for some interesting notes regarding the family of Gabriel Bellefontaine. Mr. Gaudet has satisfied himself in the course of years of genealogical research, that the Godins now living on the River St. John and in the county of Gloucester, the Bellefontaines of the county of Kent, and the Bellefontaines and Beausejours of Anichat and other parts of Nova Scotia all have a common origin, and that in each case the real family name is Gaudin, or Godin. To any one conversant with the practice of the old French families of making frequent changes in their patryonymics this will not appear surprising. The common ancestor of the Gaudin, Bellefontaine, Beausejour and Bois-Joly families in the maritime provinces was one Pierre Gaudin, who married Jeanne Roussiliere of Montreal, Oct. 13, 1654, and subsequently came to Port Royal with his wife and children. Their fourth child, Gabriel Gaudin (or Bellefontaine) born in 1661, settled on the St. John river in the vicinity of Fort Nashwaak. He married at Quebec in 1690, Angelique Robert Jeanne, a girl of sixteen, and in the census of 1698 the names of four children appear, viz., Louise aged 7, Louis 5, Joseph 3, Jacques Phillipe 7 months. Of these children the third, Joseph Bellefontaine, spent the best years of his life upon the St. John river and his tribulations there have been already noticed[97] in these pages. He was living at Cherbourg in 1767 at the age of 71 years, and was granted a pension of 300 livres (equivalent to rather more than $60.00 per annum) in recognition of his losses and services which are thus summarised:
“The Sieur Joseph Bellefontaine or Beausejour of the River St. John, son of Gabriel (an officer of one of the King’s ships in Acadia) and of Angelique Roberte Jeanne, was commissioned Major of the militia of the St. John river by order of M. de la Galissonniere of 10th April, 1749, and has always done his duty during the war until he was made prisoner by the enemy. He owned several leagues of land there and had the sad misfortune of seeing one of his daughters and three of her children massacred before his eyes by the English, who wished by such cruelty and fear of similar treatment to induce him to take their part, a fate that he only escaped by fleeing to the woods, bearing with him two other children of the same daughter.”