Chapter 3 EARLY HISTORY

Bounded almost on three sides by the Hillsborough River and Bay, our district was ideally located for French settlement because of its proximity to Port la J oie. De la Roque’s 1752 census showed settlers at Anse de St Pierre

(now Keppoch).

Named for the Count de St. Pierre, Anse de St. Pierre was selected as an agricultural site. While only four families (totalling 31 persons) settled there, they made great progress in tilling the soil. When British settlers ar- rived some 20 years later, the land was opened for further development.

After the expulsion of the French in 1758, little reference is made to our district until the 1798 census. In all of Lot 48 there were then only 12

families—the names now being Scots and English. Among them we find two Southport families, those of Chief Justice Peter Stewart (whose household numbered nine souls), and Benjamin Crossman (of a family of three).

Chief Justice Stewart arrived in 1775, and left a large family and colour- ful legacy at his death in 1805. In 1780 he acquired 3/5 of one—half of Lot 48. His was the first of at least five Stewart families to settle in the area. He built Stewart Hall, later known as Rose Bank House, on the point later

called Rosebank Point.

At the chief justice’s death his youngest son, Robert (“of Rose Bank”) succeeded to the farm. On Robert’s death in 1816, it passed to his son Charles (“of Rose Bank”). One or the other seems to have named it Rose Bank, from the red sandstone shore, for it was advertized in April, 1818 as “200 acres, 50 clear,” the “estate of Rose Bank formerly called Stewart Hall.” The original mansion house burned down in October, 1824, with a Rev. Fitzgerald in residence. one of Charles Stewart’s children, William Henry Stewart, was the last of the family to own Rosebank Farm. It was sold in 1880 after a century of Stewart possession.

Interestingly, both Micmac names for the area are very similar in mean- ing to the Stewart Rose Bank—they being translated as “steep red bank” according to Silas T. Rand’s list of Micmac place-names. However, we may doubt that these names—“Adoosak” and “Medubunageak”-—would now be found preferable as the village name, as suggested by the 1855 reporter in

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