The Story of the Lower River Inhabitants Proctors as Told to Me by Vida Jane (Proctor) Morgan
by Lester Morgan
1st printed December 23, 1999
Revised June 27, 2010
FORWARD
"Recollections of Vida Jane (Proctor) Morgan"
FORWARD by Lester Morgan
The following recollections are based on what my mother overheard or heard from relatives when she was a child, or on information she researched or gathered from trips when she was an adult. It should be remembered that she did not have access to much of the documentation, such as church books and census lists, that have become available since her death on January 23, 1997, nor was she aware that there were two histories available on the history of Guysborough County; Helen C. Hart’s being the most thoroughly researched.
The research that has come to light since her death reveals that (1) both John and James Proctor, who arrived in Country Harbour, Guysborough County in 1784 with the North Carolina Regiment, were in fact adults entering their thirties; that (2) they had an adult sister named Mary (nicknamed Polly because her mother was also a Mary, a Spanish sea captain daughter from New Orleans). Polly shortly later married John Upton (a direct descendant of Lord Robert Upton); that (3) there were two younger siblings, Fanny and Martha at that time, and that (4) Benjamin Proctor, who settled at Sandpoint and whom my mother dismissed, when running across his name, as probably being as a black man, was, in fact, the father of all those Proctors previously mentioned.
Undoubtedly, other discrepancies will be found in what my mother has written down, but it should be remembered that her recollections are based on what she then believed to be established facts. So, with you the reader having the advantage of additional hindsight accompanied with the cited data sources, keep in mind that they are her recollections composed of what is historically correct and what she thought to have been historically correct. Information she recollects that occurred before her time should be left open to questioning, while happenings that occurred within the actual lifetimes of her grandparents, her parents, and herself can be credited with being, most likely, accurate.
Previously printed December 23, 1999
Revised June 27, 2010
"Recollections of Vida Jane (Proctor) Morgan Regarding the Proctor Family History"
My earliest recollections are of playing on our kitchen floor under the watchful eyes of two white-haired old ladies in black dresses with white collars and whose voluminous skirts and petticoats were covered by a white cambric apron which covered the skirt from the waist to the floor, an apron with bands of insertion or lace.
They both wore small steel-rimmed spectacles to aid their failing eyesight to avoid dropping stitches from the ever present knitting needles which flew faster through their fingers than their busy tongues which recalled the incidents of their shared past lives as well as daily community incidents.
I could not have been much more than a year old. I had been a precocious child and had walked and talked at the age of eight months, probably because, as a long-awaited grandchild of grandparents of old age, I had received more attention than would normally be my lot in those busy days. I was the oldest child of an only surviving son born in my grandmother’s 38th year.
I know my talking at this early age disturbed them for the older folk predicted that “this was not lucky and was the omen of an early death”.
Those two old ladies were my grandmother, my father’s mother, the former Jane Harris of St. Peters and Aunt Brigid Malcolm, wife of Uncle Bill Malcolm, and my grandmother’s sister-in-law by her first marriage as a teen age girl to John Proctor, eldest son of John Proctor, Senior, whose father, John, had been born on the banks of the James River in Isle of Wight County in the Old Dominion of Virginia and had spent his childhood on a tobacco plantation there.
John’s forefather, John Proctor, had come to Virginia in October 1607,on the first voyage of the Sea Venture, a ship which later, in 1610, was wrecked on the shores of Bermuda and some of whose survivors had remained there to become its first settlers and give England her present claim to the Bermudas. Others, including John Rolph had built a boat form the wrecked ship’s planks and made the rest of the journey safely to the Virginia colony on the James.
The first John, a native of Cornwall, and a member of the landed gentry of that county, had sailed from Plymouth that summer of 1607, a few months after the first permanent colony at the mouth of the James had been established in May 1607.
He survived the voyage, the fevers, and the Indian raids that decimated those first settlers, and had established himself as a planter by 1621, when his wife Alys, accompanied by two servants, arrived on the ship George in 1621, another servant arriving later on the Anne in 1623. A list of his chattels is given in an old volume of the Early History of John Proctor where he had landed at Pace’s Plains the first year of the settlement.
There are only two records in the same history, one of the few books rescued from the records lost when the James City Courthouse burned prior to the establishment of the city of Williamsburg.
These are contained in mimeographed pages I have of certain pages of that precious volume whose pages were so brittle and yellowed that only the historian Mrs. Dorothy Grubbs was permitted to touch it or mimeograph requested pages.
The second item on page 269 states that Alice (Pierce) Bennett of Lawne’s Creek in Isle of Wight County, Virginia in October 1624 testified before the General Court in a trial of John Proctor, her neighbor, charged with cruelty to is servants.
I can attest to the violent and swift outbursts of rage that still are the unfortunate inheritance of some members of my father’s family, so I can well believe the charges may have been justified although the outcome has not been given.
The only other item in this ancient text deals with Captain John Moone, a member of the House of Burgesses in 1640, 1652 and 1654 – 55 and whose plantation was also in Isle of Wight County at “Poplar Neck”. His will probated in 1718 lists his sister Bridget married to Jeremiah Proctor.
How did I learn of all this before my curiosity took me in my old age to Virginia to seek this information?
As a child of six already able to read and write, after a fashion, I walked the two miles to a small one room school, holding the hand of my older cousin, Irene Proctor, who, at this date is still alive as far as I know, and is the wife or widow rather of Capt. David Parker, a United States Naval Officer, long since retired and possibly dead. If alive, she is now in her nineties.
There we had to cope with the rivalries and childhood feuds between the Loyalist Proctors and the rest of the students who were mostly Irish from County Clare and County Kilkenny: the many McNamaras, McCarthys and Hayes children. In anger, they called us Creoles and as a young girl I was worried and took my troubles to Grand-Uncle Robert, as we called him, our next door neighbor, who had fought with the North in the American Civil War.
He was then in his late seventies and I sat at his feet for hours as a child hearing stories of his adventures as a boson on square-rigged ships and as a chantey man and his stories of the War some of which will come later. He had known his Virginia born grandfather, a drummer boy, along with his older brother James in his father’s regiment, the Royal North Carolina Regiment whose Commanding Officer had been Lieutenant Colonel John Hamilton of Virginia. He had been fourteen when his grandfather died and at his knee, had learned of his grandfather’s early life on a Virginia tobacco plantation with indentured servants and later, negro slaves. In the wilderness and privations of Nova Scotia, at Country Harbour where he was landed with his brother at the age of 16, having become attached to the Regiment n 1781 at the age of 12. He had moved, following his brother to Chedabucto on the Guysborough shore and then to the valley of the River Inhabitants across the Gut of Canso on the Cape Breton side in the hear 1800 or 1801, but his heart and memories were still in his native Virginia as he neared the end of his long life.
He told Uncle Robert that his father in his middle years, with two young sons, had to leave his own father’s plantation because of his Royalist sympathies in a largely Republican Virginian milieu, and join the Royal North Carolina Regiment whose leader was a Virginian too, although few Virginians joined the Royalists, but even the famous Byrd family were split b y members who joined the Royalists. His two sons, one 12, one older, were taken on as drummer boys and, as such, they were each given 100 acre grants of land at Country Harbour by Governor Parr in May 1783 along with many others who came on British ships from where their regiments were disbanded. The Royal North Carolina Regiment was mustered out on April 26th (my own father’s birthday) and reached Halifax from St. Augustine, Florida sometime in May 1783; after having fought since 1781 in Georgian and the Carolinas.
His father remained in Halifax, as he was middle aged and feared pioneering. The older man opened a store on the corner of Proctor and Water Streets where Uncle Robert said the Old Cunard building later stood. The street and the wharf below it which bore his name: Proctor’s Wharf later became the Cunard Wharf. He is buried somewhere in Halifax whether in the part of St. Paul’s now covered by houses or in St. Georges I cannot find out.
Coming from Virginia, he was probably an Anglican, if he had any Church affiliation. His wife, however, was a Creole, a Spanish Sea Captain’s daughter from New Orleans, Louisiana. When I told this to the historian at Jamestown, she said it verified the story he told me, for in the years before the Revolution, the planters sent their tobacco from Tidewater plantations to New Orleans, then owned by France, to escape the British tax imposed on Colonial exports of tobacco.
The planter’s sons who usually accompanied the smuggled tobacco obtained through trade with the Spanish and French in New Orleans, stayed a while to enjoy its pleasures and frequently married French or Spanish Creole women, that is, women of Spanish or French descent but born in the New World as opposed to the Old as some of their parents had been.
Now I knew why they called the Proctors “Creoles”.
Uncle Robert’s grandfather only sixteen when he landed at County Harbour in 1783, had later married a Miss Helena Hall (actually Eleanor, also known as Elly, Wall), the daughter of Jeffrey Hall (actually Wall who came from Florida as a Loyalist on the same ship as he did, and whose grant at Country Harbour was given at the same time. They probably had met on shipboard as teenagers on the two or three week voyage.
His older brother James moved to the Nova Scotia side of the Strait and he and his descendants are long since lost to us, although there are several children listed under the name Proctor in the history of Guysborough list of army dependents. James, the older brother, might have been much older and married or they were servants or slaves bearing the family name.
Having given up his Country Harbour Grant, John bought granted lands from Michael Boudrot and Clement Hubert, a merchant who had large grants in the area. Hubert’s grant was one of the earliest Grants in what is now Richmond County. Proctor also obtained grants on both sides of River Inhabitants – one still in the names of Proctors the other where my great-grandfather Robert Proctor lived.
1 According to land records, it was John and not his father Benjamin who settled in Halifax as a merchant in Halifax for a time, after first going Guysborough are with his father and siblings. Benjamin actually settled at Sandpoint with his two younger children and probably a second wife.
2 A Record of their marriage certificate were found at Guysborough Anglican Church by Robert Proctor son of Michael Proctor of Sydney, NS.
The grant on the West side was until lately called Sebastapol because the McNamaras claimed the land was part of their land and a fight between the two families ensued during the battle of Sebastapol in the Crimean War, so some local wit had dubbed the scene of the local fight Sebastapol and the name was still used to designate the wooded part of the grant during my youth.
The West side grant given to my great-grandfather is now held by his descendants in part, and in part by the Kings, descendants of Roberts’ daughter Mary who married George King. His father’s people were also Loyalists from Virginia who came with the St. Augustine group of Loyalists to Country Harbour in 1783. The names of Henry Stirling and John King were on the list of these Loyalists.
Henry King settled later in Plaster Cove, now Point Tupper. In the Archives, is his application for a grant of land in Caribou Cove, now Port Malcolm, at the mouth of River Inhabitants. In his petition he stated that he had lost all his valuable possessions in Virginia because of his loyalty to the Crown and he was unable to support his large family in Plaster Cover (Point Tupper) because of the heavy gypsum content of the soil. The request was granted. My great-grandfather Robert was a giant of a man both in stature and strength. He was supposed to have been six foot seven inches tall with broad shoulders. At an advanced age, (late eighties) he was said to have carried a hundred ninety-six pound barrel of flour on is shoulders form his wharf to his home which stood on the site of Harold King’s father’s old home, and his present home.
His daughter (Mary King) was a midwife and her eldest son Robert, his namesake was brought up by his grandfather and given a deed of the land his family now owns. Nearby settled John Upton, a member of Lord Montagu’s Regiment, another loyalist, and a descendant of Sir Henry Upton of the Carolinas.
John Proctor Sr. had three sons, who survived to marry, and several daughters. John married a Miss Hearn from St. Peters and his descendants were brought up as Roman Catholics. his eldest son John married my grandmother Jane Harris of St. Peters, a grand-daughter of Lieutenant John Brierly of the Hierlihy Regiment, the first settler on the site of Antigonish town. Her husband died as a young man of tuberculosis (also reported as pneumonia) and left her with two small children, my father’s half brother Uncle Ned (Edward) and a daughter Anne. Anne chocked on a bone and died at the age of three, while my grandmother, who had left her with a baby sitter, was helping a neighbor, her former sister-in-law, Aunt Ellen Proctor (Uncle Michael’s wife) who was in childbirth. Uncle Ned, a lithe, slim man was an expert step-dancer as was my grandmother. He was twenty-one years older than my father and my father was very fond of his older brother. Unfortunately he liked drink and this was a cross to my grandmother and possibly why my father was not a partaker of strong drink although he always had liquor in the house to treat his visiting friends who were mostly sea captains and expected their glass of hospitality.
Uncle Ned was a first mate on the old tea clippers sailing out of New York around the Horn to the East Indies.
For years I had his old sea chest made of camphor wood with its ivory clasp and false bottom for smuggling.
Uncle Ned, born in 1841 on October 21st, my eldest son’s birthday, died unmarred in his earl forties around 1883. His square-rigged ship, a tea clipper, had just arrived in the Port of New York from the East Indies and he and his Captain were making their way across the railroad yards that bordered the dock area. Trains were shunting cars in the busy railway yards and the captain, who was slightly behind him saw him step in front o fan approaching train of cars and pulled him back to what he thought was safety; but, he failed to notice the open switch and the train shifted to the track he was on and struck him.
The stricken captain, who blamed his error for his death, contacted my father in Gloucester and by the time his vessel arrived in port, Uncle Ned had been buried in New York by the captain. Dad went to New York, was warmly received by the grieving captain, taken to his grave, and given his clothes chest and other belongings.
In his picture which we still have, he appears to have been a dark, handsome man with clear cut features, probably a legacy from his Spanish ancestors.
John, Uncle Ned’s grandfather was the most prosperous of the three sons. He had a large family the youngest of whom was named John in memory of his dead older brother.
True to their Cornish and Spanish blood, they built vessels and took to the Sea.
James married a women (name unknown) from Port Richmond or the old name Caribou cove. His descendants numbering merchants and sea captains were Methodist and later United Church members.
Robert, my great grandfather married a Miss Critchell from St. Peters – a lady of Irish extraction and his descendants were Roman Catholics. He was probably the least well-off of the three Sons of John Sr.
There were at least two girls, Mary married another Loyalist descendant John Upton and Susan and Phoebe; but, I do not know what became of them or if they lived to marry.
Among John’s sons were men I knew and called Uncle, for my father called his half-brother’s uncles his uncles, and neglected to call his own uncles by that name.
The ones I knew were Uncle Robert, the boson and chantey leader and my dearly loved mentor who had lived an exciting life. He had joined the American Navy at the outbreak of the Civil War or War Between the States as our neighbors call it. He told me of the fight between the Monitor and Merrimac. The remains of one of them is now in the news as its wreck has been discovered, although neither was sunk in the encounter.
Later, he transferred to the Sixth New York Cavalry and his regiment, along with other Mounted Regiments arrived at Gettysburg first before the Northern infantry and held the Cemetery and higher ground until the Northern Infantry under Meade arrived and thus gave the North an advantage.
He vividly described the battle to me especially Pigott’s charge across the Devil’s Cap where they were slaughtered by the Northern Cannon on the higher ground. He spoke of their gallant fighting and the famed rebel yell and the corpse – laden battlefield. He told me of the Battle of the Wilderness and the Siege of Richmond, Virginia and somehow his Southern blood, inherited from his Virginians ancestors, felt a kinship with the gray clad enemy who fought so gamely against a stronger enemy. He spoke of prisoners taken with boots in shreds, shabby torn uniforms, and only a handful of parched corn as their rations.
He spoke of exploring the underground shelters and empty storehouses of Richmond after its surrender. He lost an eye or damaged it so it had to be removed later and received a small pension from the American Defence department in his last years.
Today his bones lie in a country churchyard in Grantville, near Port Hawkesbury where lie monuments to so many lost at sea, and a plaque near his grave placed by the American Government recalls his soldering in the Civil War.
A trip to Gettysburg and a tour of the battlefield recalled his stories and I saw the monument erected to the Sixth New York Cavalry on the site where it fought, and I stood b a huge rock and looked across the Devils Gap and saw in my mind’s eye, Piggotts’ men in gray falling and dying in the desperate charge. I verified all he had told me. What a remarkable memory he had! He told me as a sailor, he had eaten in an Inn under London Bridge. I took that with a grain of salt until I learned later that the old London Bridge had been lined on both sides with buildings, had shops, and as I crossed the several b ridges over the Themes on a visit there, I thought of him as I tried to visualize it as he saw it in the days of sailing ships.
Uncle Mike, another brother, on a trip to the American Coast, was forced to enter Newport News for repairs to his ship around 1868. He took time during the weeks he stayed, to visit the area which his grandfather had described so vividly. The plantation house had been burned down during the War but the huge iron gates were still standing and the family had moved elsewhere, victims of the lost war.
Years later in Hampton, I saw in the telephone directory a list of Proctor names, the same names used since generations in my family in Cape Breton, the Johns, Edwards, Williams, James, Roberts and one with my father’s name: James W.; and, in Arlington Cemetery near the tomb of the unknown soldier, a monument bears the same name with the same spelling, so their descendants still live in Virginia.
I still remember Uncle Jim – slight and dark like Uncle Robert and married to a Bridget McNamara. Uncle Robert had married a Margaret Malcolm, my beloved Aunt Maggie, who, although a fervent Methodist, had dressed me for my First Communion. Ecumenism was strong in our community even in those days. I never knew religious prejudice until I left home and my native village and went out into the wider world.
Uncle (Captain) Ned married Jane Delaney of St. John’s, Newfoundland. She was the daughter and sister of Sea-captains and was the wife of a sea-captain as Uncle Ned, a fair haired blue eyed man, was a sea-captain and owner of several vessels some of which he and his sons built. Her son William was a captain too of one of his father’s vessels: the Emma P., named for the youngest sister. On her first trip to Bay Chaleur, the younger son Jim was knocked overboard in a storm by a swinging boom and she came back to our river with her flag at half mast to break the news to their mother that her favorite son was lost. I remember Aunt Jane, who was dark with aquiline features and graying hair. They had a large family. Several of the girls were teachers and married well in the United States. Uncle Ned was a merchant too. Uncle Ned’s sister, Brigid, married Uncle Bill Malcolm, a merchant and fish buyer of Port Malcolm (Caribou Cove). H at one time owned five vessels. It was his wife, my grandmother’s friend and sister-in-law, whom I recall watching me as I played as a tiny tot.
After leaving our home during that visit, she spent a short time at the home of Uncle Ned and Aunt Jane, at her old home and my grandfather took her by horse and sleigh to her home in Port Malcolm as a bad storm was expected. That night the storm came and it blew the back door open. Hearing the door slamming Aunt Bridgid, then in he eighties, arose and tried to close it, but the wind caught her and threw her on the back platform and slammed the door shut. They found her there the next morning frozen stiff under the snow.
Another sister Susan married Captain John Colford of St. John’s Newfoundland.
Michael’s son Edward became captain of the trawler Anita and Beatrice which sank off Sable Island in the 1923 August Gale.
Reported lost at the same time was his first cousin Captain Edward Proctor (Uncle Jim’s son). Their two wives came to live together in Gloucester awaiting news. At last one of the ships arrived safely, having taken shelter in Louisbourg Harbour during the storm, but unable to communicate with home.
Captain Edward Proctor later became President of the Fisherman’s Association of Gloucester and I met him there. He and my father had been dory mates for twenty-five years in the days of the schooners. He was one of the captains serving with Captain Ben Pine on the Gertrude Thibeau when she raced the Bluenose in 1931. My father met him before the race and was able to follow the race on the judge’s boat through his kindness. That was the last time they met.
I was at my father’s in March 1942 when news came of his (Capt. Edward’s) death and my father then 79, cried for hours. After the loss of his brother Ned when he was barely 20, Capt. Ned was the nearest substitute for a brother.
My grandmother, Jane Harris, as I stated before, was the grand daughter of another Loyalist Officer, Lieutenant John Brierley of the Hierlihy Regiment, a regiment of Irish emigrants possibly from the North of Ireland, raised by Colonel Hierlihy of New Your State and recruited mostly in that British held area, to fight on the side of Britain in that conflict.
The regiment was sent to garrison then St. John’s Island, later Prince Edward Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to prevent privateering raids by the Republican side and on disbanding in 1783, they were given grants in what was then Sydney County, now Antigonish County across the Northumberland Strait from Prince Edward Island as Pictou the area directly across, had been mostly taken up by earlier Scottish settlers.
My grandfather was given a six hundred fifty acre grant by Governor Parr as were Colonel Hierlihy and his son Captain Hierlihy and other officers and men of the ranks who received lesser grants. I have a copy of that regimental grant dated October 1783.
My grandfather’s grant was in and around the town of Antigonish and his farm home is supposed to have been on the site now occupied by Eileen Cameron Henry, a poet and town councilor of the town. The small river, Brierly Brook which runs to the town of Antigonish and the adjacent hamlet of Brierley Brook still bear his name as the first known settler on the town site.
He had two daughters when he was called back to Ireland in later years to settle his uncle’s estate at the time of the Irish troubles at the turn of the eighteenth century. He left his two motherless children with a brother officer and whether he was drowned on the way over during the Napoleonic Wars or was killed by his uncle’s Irish tenants in that troubled time, he died, supposedly, in Ireland.
One of his daughters married a Delaney from Pictou County. She had several children by her first husband, one of whose children’s children visited my father during my childhood. That young lady was a teacher and visited with a friend, a Miss Sara Boyd, daughter of Angus Boyd from River Bourgeois, the great-grandfather of Arthur and Terrence Donahue, now in the Provincial Cabinet.
After her first husband’s death, my great-grandmother married a Harris, whether one of the Pictou Harrises or a Harris from the Cape Breton regions which lists a Harris among its Irish settlers, I don not know, but they settled in the St. Peter’s village in Southern Cape Breton where my grandmother and her sisters and brothers were born.
One of her brothers died of hypoglycemia at seventeen. This illness, a hereditary one was unknown at the time and finding him dead in the field at that age, they thought it might be some form of epilepsy.
My father had the disease and often was found unconscious from it, but survived to reach the age of eighty-five. My sister, my son and I also have inherited this troublesome ailment and have had frequent blackouts from it. All have been checked for epilepsy and our brain waves are normal.
My grandmother’s sister, Nancy, married a Fitzgerald from St. Peters and moved to Providence, Rhode island and her brother moved there also as well as another sister who married a Samson, an Acadian from L’Ardoise, Richmond County.
All records of this family’s births, marriages, and otherwise were burned when the old St. Peter’s Church was destroyed by fire in the 1800’s. They were probably Anglicans when they came to this land as Brierley was an officer in the regiment, but by now they were Catholics by marriage to Irish settlers.
by Lester Morgan
1st printed December 23, 1999
Revised June 27, 2010
FORWARD
"Recollections of Vida Jane (Proctor) Morgan"
FORWARD by Lester Morgan
The following recollections are based on what my mother overheard or heard from relatives when she was a child, or on information she researched or gathered from trips when she was an adult. It should be remembered that she did not have access to much of the documentation, such as church books and census lists, that have become available since her death on January 23, 1997, nor was she aware that there were two histories available on the history of Guysborough County; Helen C. Hart’s being the most thoroughly researched.
The research that has come to light since her death reveals that (1) both John and James Proctor, who arrived in Country Harbour, Guysborough County in 1784 with the North Carolina Regiment, were in fact adults entering their thirties; that (2) they had an adult sister named Mary (nicknamed Polly because her mother was also a Mary, a Spanish sea captain daughter from New Orleans). Polly shortly later married John Upton (a direct descendant of Lord Robert Upton); that (3) there were two younger siblings, Fanny and Martha at that time, and that (4) Benjamin Proctor, who settled at Sandpoint and whom my mother dismissed, when running across his name, as probably being as a black man, was, in fact, the father of all those Proctors previously mentioned.
Undoubtedly, other discrepancies will be found in what my mother has written down, but it should be remembered that her recollections are based on what she then believed to be established facts. So, with you the reader having the advantage of additional hindsight accompanied with the cited data sources, keep in mind that they are her recollections composed of what is historically correct and what she thought to have been historically correct. Information she recollects that occurred before her time should be left open to questioning, while happenings that occurred within the actual lifetimes of her grandparents, her parents, and herself can be credited with being, most likely, accurate.
Previously printed December 23, 1999
Revised June 27, 2010
"Recollections of Vida Jane (Proctor) Morgan Regarding the Proctor Family History"
My earliest recollections are of playing on our kitchen floor under the watchful eyes of two white-haired old ladies in black dresses with white collars and whose voluminous skirts and petticoats were covered by a white cambric apron which covered the skirt from the waist to the floor, an apron with bands of insertion or lace.
They both wore small steel-rimmed spectacles to aid their failing eyesight to avoid dropping stitches from the ever present knitting needles which flew faster through their fingers than their busy tongues which recalled the incidents of their shared past lives as well as daily community incidents.
I could not have been much more than a year old. I had been a precocious child and had walked and talked at the age of eight months, probably because, as a long-awaited grandchild of grandparents of old age, I had received more attention than would normally be my lot in those busy days. I was the oldest child of an only surviving son born in my grandmother’s 38th year.
I know my talking at this early age disturbed them for the older folk predicted that “this was not lucky and was the omen of an early death”.
Those two old ladies were my grandmother, my father’s mother, the former Jane Harris of St. Peters and Aunt Brigid Malcolm, wife of Uncle Bill Malcolm, and my grandmother’s sister-in-law by her first marriage as a teen age girl to John Proctor, eldest son of John Proctor, Senior, whose father, John, had been born on the banks of the James River in Isle of Wight County in the Old Dominion of Virginia and had spent his childhood on a tobacco plantation there.
John’s forefather, John Proctor, had come to Virginia in October 1607,on the first voyage of the Sea Venture, a ship which later, in 1610, was wrecked on the shores of Bermuda and some of whose survivors had remained there to become its first settlers and give England her present claim to the Bermudas. Others, including John Rolph had built a boat form the wrecked ship’s planks and made the rest of the journey safely to the Virginia colony on the James.
The first John, a native of Cornwall, and a member of the landed gentry of that county, had sailed from Plymouth that summer of 1607, a few months after the first permanent colony at the mouth of the James had been established in May 1607.
He survived the voyage, the fevers, and the Indian raids that decimated those first settlers, and had established himself as a planter by 1621, when his wife Alys, accompanied by two servants, arrived on the ship George in 1621, another servant arriving later on the Anne in 1623. A list of his chattels is given in an old volume of the Early History of John Proctor where he had landed at Pace’s Plains the first year of the settlement.
There are only two records in the same history, one of the few books rescued from the records lost when the James City Courthouse burned prior to the establishment of the city of Williamsburg.
These are contained in mimeographed pages I have of certain pages of that precious volume whose pages were so brittle and yellowed that only the historian Mrs. Dorothy Grubbs was permitted to touch it or mimeograph requested pages.
The second item on page 269 states that Alice (Pierce) Bennett of Lawne’s Creek in Isle of Wight County, Virginia in October 1624 testified before the General Court in a trial of John Proctor, her neighbor, charged with cruelty to is servants.
I can attest to the violent and swift outbursts of rage that still are the unfortunate inheritance of some members of my father’s family, so I can well believe the charges may have been justified although the outcome has not been given.
The only other item in this ancient text deals with Captain John Moone, a member of the House of Burgesses in 1640, 1652 and 1654 – 55 and whose plantation was also in Isle of Wight County at “Poplar Neck”. His will probated in 1718 lists his sister Bridget married to Jeremiah Proctor.
How did I learn of all this before my curiosity took me in my old age to Virginia to seek this information?
As a child of six already able to read and write, after a fashion, I walked the two miles to a small one room school, holding the hand of my older cousin, Irene Proctor, who, at this date is still alive as far as I know, and is the wife or widow rather of Capt. David Parker, a United States Naval Officer, long since retired and possibly dead. If alive, she is now in her nineties.
There we had to cope with the rivalries and childhood feuds between the Loyalist Proctors and the rest of the students who were mostly Irish from County Clare and County Kilkenny: the many McNamaras, McCarthys and Hayes children. In anger, they called us Creoles and as a young girl I was worried and took my troubles to Grand-Uncle Robert, as we called him, our next door neighbor, who had fought with the North in the American Civil War.
He was then in his late seventies and I sat at his feet for hours as a child hearing stories of his adventures as a boson on square-rigged ships and as a chantey man and his stories of the War some of which will come later. He had known his Virginia born grandfather, a drummer boy, along with his older brother James in his father’s regiment, the Royal North Carolina Regiment whose Commanding Officer had been Lieutenant Colonel John Hamilton of Virginia. He had been fourteen when his grandfather died and at his knee, had learned of his grandfather’s early life on a Virginia tobacco plantation with indentured servants and later, negro slaves. In the wilderness and privations of Nova Scotia, at Country Harbour where he was landed with his brother at the age of 16, having become attached to the Regiment n 1781 at the age of 12. He had moved, following his brother to Chedabucto on the Guysborough shore and then to the valley of the River Inhabitants across the Gut of Canso on the Cape Breton side in the hear 1800 or 1801, but his heart and memories were still in his native Virginia as he neared the end of his long life.
He told Uncle Robert that his father in his middle years, with two young sons, had to leave his own father’s plantation because of his Royalist sympathies in a largely Republican Virginian milieu, and join the Royal North Carolina Regiment whose leader was a Virginian too, although few Virginians joined the Royalists, but even the famous Byrd family were split b y members who joined the Royalists. His two sons, one 12, one older, were taken on as drummer boys and, as such, they were each given 100 acre grants of land at Country Harbour by Governor Parr in May 1783 along with many others who came on British ships from where their regiments were disbanded. The Royal North Carolina Regiment was mustered out on April 26th (my own father’s birthday) and reached Halifax from St. Augustine, Florida sometime in May 1783; after having fought since 1781 in Georgian and the Carolinas.
His father remained in Halifax, as he was middle aged and feared pioneering. The older man opened a store on the corner of Proctor and Water Streets where Uncle Robert said the Old Cunard building later stood. The street and the wharf below it which bore his name: Proctor’s Wharf later became the Cunard Wharf. He is buried somewhere in Halifax whether in the part of St. Paul’s now covered by houses or in St. Georges I cannot find out.
Coming from Virginia, he was probably an Anglican, if he had any Church affiliation. His wife, however, was a Creole, a Spanish Sea Captain’s daughter from New Orleans, Louisiana. When I told this to the historian at Jamestown, she said it verified the story he told me, for in the years before the Revolution, the planters sent their tobacco from Tidewater plantations to New Orleans, then owned by France, to escape the British tax imposed on Colonial exports of tobacco.
The planter’s sons who usually accompanied the smuggled tobacco obtained through trade with the Spanish and French in New Orleans, stayed a while to enjoy its pleasures and frequently married French or Spanish Creole women, that is, women of Spanish or French descent but born in the New World as opposed to the Old as some of their parents had been.
Now I knew why they called the Proctors “Creoles”.
Uncle Robert’s grandfather only sixteen when he landed at County Harbour in 1783, had later married a Miss Helena Hall (actually Eleanor, also known as Elly, Wall), the daughter of Jeffrey Hall (actually Wall who came from Florida as a Loyalist on the same ship as he did, and whose grant at Country Harbour was given at the same time. They probably had met on shipboard as teenagers on the two or three week voyage.
His older brother James moved to the Nova Scotia side of the Strait and he and his descendants are long since lost to us, although there are several children listed under the name Proctor in the history of Guysborough list of army dependents. James, the older brother, might have been much older and married or they were servants or slaves bearing the family name.
Having given up his Country Harbour Grant, John bought granted lands from Michael Boudrot and Clement Hubert, a merchant who had large grants in the area. Hubert’s grant was one of the earliest Grants in what is now Richmond County. Proctor also obtained grants on both sides of River Inhabitants – one still in the names of Proctors the other where my great-grandfather Robert Proctor lived.
1 According to land records, it was John and not his father Benjamin who settled in Halifax as a merchant in Halifax for a time, after first going Guysborough are with his father and siblings. Benjamin actually settled at Sandpoint with his two younger children and probably a second wife.
2 A Record of their marriage certificate were found at Guysborough Anglican Church by Robert Proctor son of Michael Proctor of Sydney, NS.
The grant on the West side was until lately called Sebastapol because the McNamaras claimed the land was part of their land and a fight between the two families ensued during the battle of Sebastapol in the Crimean War, so some local wit had dubbed the scene of the local fight Sebastapol and the name was still used to designate the wooded part of the grant during my youth.
The West side grant given to my great-grandfather is now held by his descendants in part, and in part by the Kings, descendants of Roberts’ daughter Mary who married George King. His father’s people were also Loyalists from Virginia who came with the St. Augustine group of Loyalists to Country Harbour in 1783. The names of Henry Stirling and John King were on the list of these Loyalists.
Henry King settled later in Plaster Cove, now Point Tupper. In the Archives, is his application for a grant of land in Caribou Cove, now Port Malcolm, at the mouth of River Inhabitants. In his petition he stated that he had lost all his valuable possessions in Virginia because of his loyalty to the Crown and he was unable to support his large family in Plaster Cover (Point Tupper) because of the heavy gypsum content of the soil. The request was granted. My great-grandfather Robert was a giant of a man both in stature and strength. He was supposed to have been six foot seven inches tall with broad shoulders. At an advanced age, (late eighties) he was said to have carried a hundred ninety-six pound barrel of flour on is shoulders form his wharf to his home which stood on the site of Harold King’s father’s old home, and his present home.
His daughter (Mary King) was a midwife and her eldest son Robert, his namesake was brought up by his grandfather and given a deed of the land his family now owns. Nearby settled John Upton, a member of Lord Montagu’s Regiment, another loyalist, and a descendant of Sir Henry Upton of the Carolinas.
John Proctor Sr. had three sons, who survived to marry, and several daughters. John married a Miss Hearn from St. Peters and his descendants were brought up as Roman Catholics. his eldest son John married my grandmother Jane Harris of St. Peters, a grand-daughter of Lieutenant John Brierly of the Hierlihy Regiment, the first settler on the site of Antigonish town. Her husband died as a young man of tuberculosis (also reported as pneumonia) and left her with two small children, my father’s half brother Uncle Ned (Edward) and a daughter Anne. Anne chocked on a bone and died at the age of three, while my grandmother, who had left her with a baby sitter, was helping a neighbor, her former sister-in-law, Aunt Ellen Proctor (Uncle Michael’s wife) who was in childbirth. Uncle Ned, a lithe, slim man was an expert step-dancer as was my grandmother. He was twenty-one years older than my father and my father was very fond of his older brother. Unfortunately he liked drink and this was a cross to my grandmother and possibly why my father was not a partaker of strong drink although he always had liquor in the house to treat his visiting friends who were mostly sea captains and expected their glass of hospitality.
Uncle Ned was a first mate on the old tea clippers sailing out of New York around the Horn to the East Indies.
For years I had his old sea chest made of camphor wood with its ivory clasp and false bottom for smuggling.
Uncle Ned, born in 1841 on October 21st, my eldest son’s birthday, died unmarred in his earl forties around 1883. His square-rigged ship, a tea clipper, had just arrived in the Port of New York from the East Indies and he and his Captain were making their way across the railroad yards that bordered the dock area. Trains were shunting cars in the busy railway yards and the captain, who was slightly behind him saw him step in front o fan approaching train of cars and pulled him back to what he thought was safety; but, he failed to notice the open switch and the train shifted to the track he was on and struck him.
The stricken captain, who blamed his error for his death, contacted my father in Gloucester and by the time his vessel arrived in port, Uncle Ned had been buried in New York by the captain. Dad went to New York, was warmly received by the grieving captain, taken to his grave, and given his clothes chest and other belongings.
In his picture which we still have, he appears to have been a dark, handsome man with clear cut features, probably a legacy from his Spanish ancestors.
John, Uncle Ned’s grandfather was the most prosperous of the three sons. He had a large family the youngest of whom was named John in memory of his dead older brother.
True to their Cornish and Spanish blood, they built vessels and took to the Sea.
James married a women (name unknown) from Port Richmond or the old name Caribou cove. His descendants numbering merchants and sea captains were Methodist and later United Church members.
Robert, my great grandfather married a Miss Critchell from St. Peters – a lady of Irish extraction and his descendants were Roman Catholics. He was probably the least well-off of the three Sons of John Sr.
There were at least two girls, Mary married another Loyalist descendant John Upton and Susan and Phoebe; but, I do not know what became of them or if they lived to marry.
Among John’s sons were men I knew and called Uncle, for my father called his half-brother’s uncles his uncles, and neglected to call his own uncles by that name.
The ones I knew were Uncle Robert, the boson and chantey leader and my dearly loved mentor who had lived an exciting life. He had joined the American Navy at the outbreak of the Civil War or War Between the States as our neighbors call it. He told me of the fight between the Monitor and Merrimac. The remains of one of them is now in the news as its wreck has been discovered, although neither was sunk in the encounter.
Later, he transferred to the Sixth New York Cavalry and his regiment, along with other Mounted Regiments arrived at Gettysburg first before the Northern infantry and held the Cemetery and higher ground until the Northern Infantry under Meade arrived and thus gave the North an advantage.
He vividly described the battle to me especially Pigott’s charge across the Devil’s Cap where they were slaughtered by the Northern Cannon on the higher ground. He spoke of their gallant fighting and the famed rebel yell and the corpse – laden battlefield. He told me of the Battle of the Wilderness and the Siege of Richmond, Virginia and somehow his Southern blood, inherited from his Virginians ancestors, felt a kinship with the gray clad enemy who fought so gamely against a stronger enemy. He spoke of prisoners taken with boots in shreds, shabby torn uniforms, and only a handful of parched corn as their rations.
He spoke of exploring the underground shelters and empty storehouses of Richmond after its surrender. He lost an eye or damaged it so it had to be removed later and received a small pension from the American Defence department in his last years.
Today his bones lie in a country churchyard in Grantville, near Port Hawkesbury where lie monuments to so many lost at sea, and a plaque near his grave placed by the American Government recalls his soldering in the Civil War.
A trip to Gettysburg and a tour of the battlefield recalled his stories and I saw the monument erected to the Sixth New York Cavalry on the site where it fought, and I stood b a huge rock and looked across the Devils Gap and saw in my mind’s eye, Piggotts’ men in gray falling and dying in the desperate charge. I verified all he had told me. What a remarkable memory he had! He told me as a sailor, he had eaten in an Inn under London Bridge. I took that with a grain of salt until I learned later that the old London Bridge had been lined on both sides with buildings, had shops, and as I crossed the several b ridges over the Themes on a visit there, I thought of him as I tried to visualize it as he saw it in the days of sailing ships.
Uncle Mike, another brother, on a trip to the American Coast, was forced to enter Newport News for repairs to his ship around 1868. He took time during the weeks he stayed, to visit the area which his grandfather had described so vividly. The plantation house had been burned down during the War but the huge iron gates were still standing and the family had moved elsewhere, victims of the lost war.
Years later in Hampton, I saw in the telephone directory a list of Proctor names, the same names used since generations in my family in Cape Breton, the Johns, Edwards, Williams, James, Roberts and one with my father’s name: James W.; and, in Arlington Cemetery near the tomb of the unknown soldier, a monument bears the same name with the same spelling, so their descendants still live in Virginia.
I still remember Uncle Jim – slight and dark like Uncle Robert and married to a Bridget McNamara. Uncle Robert had married a Margaret Malcolm, my beloved Aunt Maggie, who, although a fervent Methodist, had dressed me for my First Communion. Ecumenism was strong in our community even in those days. I never knew religious prejudice until I left home and my native village and went out into the wider world.
Uncle (Captain) Ned married Jane Delaney of St. John’s, Newfoundland. She was the daughter and sister of Sea-captains and was the wife of a sea-captain as Uncle Ned, a fair haired blue eyed man, was a sea-captain and owner of several vessels some of which he and his sons built. Her son William was a captain too of one of his father’s vessels: the Emma P., named for the youngest sister. On her first trip to Bay Chaleur, the younger son Jim was knocked overboard in a storm by a swinging boom and she came back to our river with her flag at half mast to break the news to their mother that her favorite son was lost. I remember Aunt Jane, who was dark with aquiline features and graying hair. They had a large family. Several of the girls were teachers and married well in the United States. Uncle Ned was a merchant too. Uncle Ned’s sister, Brigid, married Uncle Bill Malcolm, a merchant and fish buyer of Port Malcolm (Caribou Cove). H at one time owned five vessels. It was his wife, my grandmother’s friend and sister-in-law, whom I recall watching me as I played as a tiny tot.
After leaving our home during that visit, she spent a short time at the home of Uncle Ned and Aunt Jane, at her old home and my grandfather took her by horse and sleigh to her home in Port Malcolm as a bad storm was expected. That night the storm came and it blew the back door open. Hearing the door slamming Aunt Bridgid, then in he eighties, arose and tried to close it, but the wind caught her and threw her on the back platform and slammed the door shut. They found her there the next morning frozen stiff under the snow.
Another sister Susan married Captain John Colford of St. John’s Newfoundland.
Michael’s son Edward became captain of the trawler Anita and Beatrice which sank off Sable Island in the 1923 August Gale.
Reported lost at the same time was his first cousin Captain Edward Proctor (Uncle Jim’s son). Their two wives came to live together in Gloucester awaiting news. At last one of the ships arrived safely, having taken shelter in Louisbourg Harbour during the storm, but unable to communicate with home.
Captain Edward Proctor later became President of the Fisherman’s Association of Gloucester and I met him there. He and my father had been dory mates for twenty-five years in the days of the schooners. He was one of the captains serving with Captain Ben Pine on the Gertrude Thibeau when she raced the Bluenose in 1931. My father met him before the race and was able to follow the race on the judge’s boat through his kindness. That was the last time they met.
I was at my father’s in March 1942 when news came of his (Capt. Edward’s) death and my father then 79, cried for hours. After the loss of his brother Ned when he was barely 20, Capt. Ned was the nearest substitute for a brother.
My grandmother, Jane Harris, as I stated before, was the grand daughter of another Loyalist Officer, Lieutenant John Brierley of the Hierlihy Regiment, a regiment of Irish emigrants possibly from the North of Ireland, raised by Colonel Hierlihy of New Your State and recruited mostly in that British held area, to fight on the side of Britain in that conflict.
The regiment was sent to garrison then St. John’s Island, later Prince Edward Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to prevent privateering raids by the Republican side and on disbanding in 1783, they were given grants in what was then Sydney County, now Antigonish County across the Northumberland Strait from Prince Edward Island as Pictou the area directly across, had been mostly taken up by earlier Scottish settlers.
My grandfather was given a six hundred fifty acre grant by Governor Parr as were Colonel Hierlihy and his son Captain Hierlihy and other officers and men of the ranks who received lesser grants. I have a copy of that regimental grant dated October 1783.
My grandfather’s grant was in and around the town of Antigonish and his farm home is supposed to have been on the site now occupied by Eileen Cameron Henry, a poet and town councilor of the town. The small river, Brierly Brook which runs to the town of Antigonish and the adjacent hamlet of Brierley Brook still bear his name as the first known settler on the town site.
He had two daughters when he was called back to Ireland in later years to settle his uncle’s estate at the time of the Irish troubles at the turn of the eighteenth century. He left his two motherless children with a brother officer and whether he was drowned on the way over during the Napoleonic Wars or was killed by his uncle’s Irish tenants in that troubled time, he died, supposedly, in Ireland.
One of his daughters married a Delaney from Pictou County. She had several children by her first husband, one of whose children’s children visited my father during my childhood. That young lady was a teacher and visited with a friend, a Miss Sara Boyd, daughter of Angus Boyd from River Bourgeois, the great-grandfather of Arthur and Terrence Donahue, now in the Provincial Cabinet.
After her first husband’s death, my great-grandmother married a Harris, whether one of the Pictou Harrises or a Harris from the Cape Breton regions which lists a Harris among its Irish settlers, I don not know, but they settled in the St. Peter’s village in Southern Cape Breton where my grandmother and her sisters and brothers were born.
One of her brothers died of hypoglycemia at seventeen. This illness, a hereditary one was unknown at the time and finding him dead in the field at that age, they thought it might be some form of epilepsy.
My father had the disease and often was found unconscious from it, but survived to reach the age of eighty-five. My sister, my son and I also have inherited this troublesome ailment and have had frequent blackouts from it. All have been checked for epilepsy and our brain waves are normal.
My grandmother’s sister, Nancy, married a Fitzgerald from St. Peters and moved to Providence, Rhode island and her brother moved there also as well as another sister who married a Samson, an Acadian from L’Ardoise, Richmond County.
All records of this family’s births, marriages, and otherwise were burned when the old St. Peter’s Church was destroyed by fire in the 1800’s. They were probably Anglicans when they came to this land as Brierley was an officer in the regiment, but by now they were Catholics by marriage to Irish settlers.
