page_title: Bathurst, New Brunswick
section_title: 1900s
hierarchical_section_title: Bathurst, New Brunswick / History / 1900s
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Plan de plongée, chemin de fer au premier plan, le port et la ville à l'arrière-plan, vers 1930. English: Bird’s eye view, railway in foreground, harbour and city in background. ca. 1930’s.
context_page_description: Bathurst is the seat of government of Gloucester County, New Brunswick, and is at the estuary of the Nepisiguit River.
context_section_description: Even as late as 1900, the Sacred Heart Academy had outdoor toilets; modern water facilities from Carter's Brook to a 200 ft AMSL tank on Murray Avenue were provided to the newly formed Town only after August 1916; a sewer system was installed at the same time, although the date of sanitary service installation at the Academy is unknown.
  The imposing (county) courthouse and jail at St. Patrick Street—built from the same Connolly (Nepisiquit) quarry granite as other official buildings of the period—dates from 1900. This replaced an earlier, and more modest, wood frame building. The jail function has been decommissioned for some years, in favour of the provincial facility at Dalhousie.
  In 1904 Bathurst was a seaport, a port of entry on the Intercolonial Railway and the Caraquet and Gulf Shore Railway and a town with a post office, 35 stores, six hotels, a steam sawmill, a shingle mill, a flour mill, three fish freezers, two carriage factories, a printing shop, three churches and a population of 3,000. A boy of fifteen, fresh out of school, could earn $18.00 per month "to work in the woods". That year, John P. Leger formed a private venture called the Bathurst Electric and Water Power Company, with aim to erect and operate at Tetagouche River Falls a hydro-electric plant. Electricity had arrived in Bathurst, twenty-two years after the Pearl Street Station had illuminated New York.
  The Northern New Brunswick and Seaboard Railway can lay claim to be the
  railway company with the fewest miles of standard gauge
  track in history. The province empowered it in 1904 to lay track
  between Nepisiguit Junction and Grand Falls, a distance of 16 miles,
  to serve the short-lived Drummond Iron Mines. It would serve, for several years from 1920, to ferry construction materials to the (Nepisiguit) Grand Falls hydroelectric power dam.
  The Annie R. plied her trade between Bathurst, Carron Point and Youghall
  Beach early in the 20th century (before private motorized transport became the norm) under the command of Jack Stever. The return fare from Bathurst to either of the points was a
  quarter. She was equipped with a steam boiler, was 36 feet long with a
  beam of eight feet and built in Bathurst. Owned by John Rennie, then
  foreman of the Caraquet Railway, the boat was built in George Eddy's
  mill by Joe Stackhouse of Saint John while he was engaged in the
  construction of the Nepisiguit Lumber Co. sawmill.
  In 1911, James Hamet Dunn, who was born in West Bathurst in 1874, returned to Bathurst to endow its first hospital, located on the Riverside Drive grounds of what was once a Doctor's office. It burned to the ground in 1917, and an expanded 35-bed structure was rebuilt in its place. The hospital eventually would grow to 60 bed capacity, and house a school of nursing. Damaged by fire in January 1951, the Dunn Hospital would pass into collective memory.
  Bathurst was incorporated as a town in 1912, following a poll of ratepayers and property holders conducted on 30 May that year in which a majority vote of 195 to 54 determined the outcome. The first election occurred on 11 September, and the budget for the first year was fixed at $8 million. The town of Bathurst's first mayor was Patrick J. Burns, who has a street (along Coronation Park) named after him.
  The civic expansion happened just prior to the closure in 1913 of the decade-old Drummond Mines Limited iron mine at the Bathurst Mining Camp. The arrival of water and sewer service to individual residences occurred in 1915, too late for the blaze on 28 April 1914 that consumed 35 buildings. Most of downtown was a blackened disaster zone.  The Drummond Mine property was eventually acquired by the Dominion Steel and Coal Company, who operated it more successfully.
  The Bathurst Power and Paper Company Ltd. built a mill in Bathurst, New Brunswick in 1914. Majority control of the company was obtained in the late 1930s by Arthur J. Nesbitt and his partner Peter A. T. Thomson through their holding company, Power Corporation of Canada. In the early 1960s, Power Corporation bought the Consolidated Paper Company
caption: 1930s bird's eye view of Bathurst, likely taken from College Sacre-Coeur. Looking east at railway in foreground, harbour and city in background.
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