The Loyalists of 1783: Landed on a Forested Shore With an Axe and a Ration

In the spring and autumn of 1783 a fleet put thousands of people ashore at the mouth of the Saint John River. There was no town. There were army tents, a ration list, and a forest. A great many of them had been shopkeepers, tailors and clerks in New York a month earlier, and most of them had never cut down a tree. This is the everyday life of the first forty years on that river: the first winter under canvas and brush with green wood for fuel, what was actually on the King's provision list and the day it ran out, the drawing of town and country lots by ticket out of a hat, the grant and the settlement duties written into it, the clearing of the first acre by axe and fire, the crop hoed into the ash between the stumps, the potash that paid for the next axe, and the mast trade that made the province rich for reasons that had nothing to do with anybody living on it. It is also the story of the promises that were kept for some of these people and not for others. The Wolastoqiyik were already on this river - it is the Wolastoq - with villages, fishing places and planting ground, and the grants of 1783 were laid over them. Free Black Loyalists were promised the same land on the same terms as everybody else, and what they actually received, where, how large and how long it took is documented and differs sharply. Other Black people came off the same ships as somebody's property. 📌 What you'll learn • The landing and the first winter: the spring, summer and autumn fleets of 1783, four competing counts of how many came ashore and why a muster roll, a provision return and a land petition can never agree, the army tents lined with spruce boughs, the brush camps, the King's provision list and its descending scale to May 1786, the nine-day boat journey ninety miles upriver, and the oldest headstone in the Saint John burial ground • How a farm was chosen and what it cost to keep: the survey by chain and axe, the drawing of town and country lots by ticket, one hundred acres for a head of family and fifty acres more for every other person in it, the officers' ladder running up toward a thousand, why four lots of identical size were four completely different farms, the settlement duties, escheat, and the fees that stood between a family and a deed • The same promise, measured out: the Wolastoqiyik of the Wolastoq, the council at Fort Howe in September 1778 and what it did and did not settle, the reserves of 1765 and what became of Ekwpahak, Tobique and Kingsclear; and the Black Loyalists - 433 town lots at Saint John, fifty-acre grants at Loch Lomond and the Kingston Peninsula, the group petitions of 1785, the city charter that barred Black freemen, the sailing to Sierra Leone in January 1792, and Willow Grove in 1817 • Clearing, and where the money actually came from: felling, logging up and burning one acre, the first crop hoed into the ash among the stumps, potash boiled down in an iron kettle and sold for a family's first cash, one full day on a river lot in 1795, the winter when the frozen river became the province's best highway, and the mast and timber trade that changed everything after 1806 Educational and historical content. 📚 Key sources - Provincial Archives of New Brunswick - Index to New Brunswick Land Grants, 1784 to 1997 (RS686), and the pre-Confederation census returns - The Loyalist Collection, University of New Brunswick Libraries - Esther Clark Wright's New Brunswick Loyalist Index, and the Book of Negroes holdings - Black Loyalists in New Brunswick, 1783 to 1854 - Atlantic Canada Virtual Archives, University of New Brunswick - Kingsclear First Nation - History of the Maliseet First Nation at Kingsclear to 1950 - Dictionary of Canadian Biography - PETERS, THOMAS, volume 4 (University of Toronto and Universite Laval) - and other sources. #Loyalists #NewBrunswick #SaintJohn #Fredericton #CanadianHistory #Genealogy #HowWeLivedHere #BlackLoyalists #Wolastoqiyik #Maritimes ℹ️ About this video Educational and historical content. The script, research and edit are the author's own, based on the sources listed in the description. The visual reconstructions and the narrator's voice are created with the help of AI, for illustrative purposes — these are not real recordings or authentic archival footage. Stories are simplified for a general audience and may contain small approximations. Purpose: to inform and to remember. 🕰️ Historical context The events described took place under legal and social conditions very different from today's. They are presented for historical understanding, without intent to justify or condemn any person, community or group.