31 LOT 45

CHAPTER IV

The Land

Early Settlement - Souris East:

When John Knight arrived on the Island in c. 1835, Souris East, then called Colville Bay, was a quiet community of ten farms and a small store which probably belonged to John Coughlan. He had been given a liquor license in 1834.1 Thomas Lyons, who arrived in 1833 and stopped for a time at the home of Francis Cheverie, has left this description: “not many in Souris then. You could hardly get along with a cart, there being no roads.”2

Why was Souris so slow in getting started? A number of Scottish families had moved into the north of Lot 45 in 1778 to settle around Big Pond but it was not until 1847 that the first piece of land in what is now the Town of Souris was sold.3 A Souris judge always claimed that the settlement of Souris was delayed unnecessarily because one of the proprietors of Lot 45 died intestate in a Paris brothel. It seems like an unusual supposition but, perhaps, he was right.

Lot 45 was drawn, originally, by William Matthew Burt and John Cal- lender in 1767, each getting 10,000 acres. These owners seemed excited by their newly acquired land. They had Walter Patterson issue them their title in 1769, nearly a year before he came out to the Island of St. John to be its first Governor.‘

On accepting the land, the new proprietors agreed, among other things, to settle their lot within ten years in the proportion of one person for every two hundred acres and to pay quit rents to the Crown to be used to provide the settlers with courts, roads, schools and government administration. The agreement also stipulated that, if one-third of the lot was not settled within four years, the whole would be forfeited.

Neither proprietor made any attempt to send out settlers. In 1775, John Callender sold his interest to Isaac Panchaud who, it seems, paid quit rent for a time. Later, in 1787, Panchaud gave John Patterson, a brother of the Governor, power to act on his behalf, went off to Paris and took no further interest in his property. He was sued as an absent debtor by three mer- chants in 1798 and his 10,000 acres was sold by the sheriff for 150 pounds to Captain John Stewartn"

At the sale in 1798, it was not clear to John Stewart, what part of the lot or township he bought. This was only established the next year when, as