Place:Chipman, Queens, New Brunswick, Canada

Watchers
NameChipman
TypeVillage
Coordinates46.171°N 65.884°W
Located inQueens, New Brunswick, Canada
See alsoChipman (parish), Queens, New Brunswick, Canadaparish in which it is located
the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

The village of Chipman is located on the banks of the Salmon River at the head of the Grand Lake, the largest freshwater lake in the Maritime provinces. The village itself is located around 73.4 kilometres from the capital city of Fredericton. Chipman, which is in Queens County, New Brunswick had a population of 1,104 in 2016, 1,236 in 2011 and 1,291 in 2006 according to the Canadian census.

History

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

The village of Chipman was founded in 1835, and was made up of portions of the older parishes of Brunswick and Canning. The first settler in what would become the Parish of Chipman was Alexander McClure of County Tyrone, who arrived in 1820 with his wife, Mary McLeod and their five daughters. Earlier settlements upriver at Gaspereau, and downriver at The Range (in Waterborough Parish), existed prior to 1820. These communities consisted of local settlers and Maine businessmen who established the first sawmills on the Salmon and Gaspereau Rivers. Immigration to the Chipman area escalated rapidly in the 1820s through the 1850s, with the large majority of new arrivals hailing from the northern counties of Ireland, in particular: Donegal, Londonderry, and Tyrone. The rapidly growing lumbering and sawmill industries were the primary impetus for this growth, which continued through most of the 19th century. The Parish of Chipman quickly became prominent because of its large population in comparison with the surrounding parishes, aided by the lure of employment from the burgeoning lumbermills, the coming of the railways, the development of the coal mining industry, and later in the 1930s, the establishment of L.E. Shaw’s brick and tile plant.

The first census, taken pre-Confederation in 1851, has not survived. The 1871 census, taken the year the first sawmill was established in Chipman proper, showed that the parish contained some 1,765 people. This was much more than the populations of the nearby parishes of Brunswick (1,315) and Cambridge (267). By the late 19th century, Chipman and its surrounding area boasted several lucrative lumber mills, large company stores, shipyards, a large scale coal mining industry, covered bridges, a bank, a grocer, a hospital, a cheese factory, a post office, a grist mill, several churches, schools and other businesses, and a passenger and cargo railway. By 1881, the population had maintained itself, and the census recorded numbers of 1,772. Throughout most of the 20th century, Chipman also benefitted from a coal mining boom.

Despite its prosperity, economic growth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was insufficient to provide employment for all the population at a time when families typically produced several children. As a consequence, Chipman experienced its own exodus of surplus labourforce, particularly young men who had gained valuable experience in lumbering and milling. Chipman-area natives became pioneering founders of the embryonic sawmill industries in Montana, Washington State and California, as well as leading businessmen in other ventures in the new western U.S. territories and states.

Research Tips

  • New Brunswick Provincial Archives. This is the introductory page. The tabs will lead you to more precise material.
  • The FamilySearch wiki. This lists the availability of vital statistics indexes for New Brunswick.
  • New Brunswick GenWeb. A round-up of a lot of genealogical information at the province, county and parish level. Lists of cemeteries and monumental inscriptions can be found here.
  • The Provincial Archives website titled The Placenames of New Brunswick has maps of all of its parishes and descriptions of some communities within them. This site contains "cadastral" maps for each parish illustrating the grantee’s name for land granted by the province. These maps are cumulative, showing all grants regardless of date.
  • Microfilm images of all Canadian censuses 1851-1911 are online at Library and Archives Canada, as well as at FamilySearch and Ancestry. The 1921 census appears to be available only at Ancestry.
  • The CanGenealogy page for New Brunswick. An overview of available online sources with links written by Dave Obee.
  • More possibilities can be found by googling "New Brunswick province family history" and investigating the results.
  • The word "rencensement", found in Sources, is French for "census".
This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Chipman, New Brunswick. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.