fl© BUSINESSES

Stores

The very first store that the Stanhope people dealt with was that of David Higgins at Three Rivers (Georgetown), and the goods bought had to be brought all the way round the eastern half of the Island by boat; no roads in 1770. If David Lawson, the Stanhope agent, had received the supplies he had been promised for the settlers, he would not have had to go shopping at Three Rivers: which obliged me to buy out of Mr. Higgins store flour and meat for such a numorus family that it sweled up the debt to such a grate sume — the beginning of Lawson’s debt to Montgomery which eventually led to his dismissal as agent. One shopping expedition in April, 1771 ended in tragedy for two Stanhope settlers, Alex Jamieson and John MacLaughlin, who drowned in Tracadie Bay returning from Fortune with a consignment of rum and molasses, five gallons of rume at 4/- per gallon and five gallons of molasses at 2/6 per gallon. Both the above quotations are from David LawSon’s A Coppy of my Misfortunes

With the first (and for some time, the only) road on the Island leading from Stanhope to Charlotte Town, this was the route taken by our settlers to sell their produce, or more likely to barter it, given the lack of specie at that time, for rum, tea and molasses, which were about the only things they could not produce right on the farm. The facility of reaching Charlotte Town market, with a few trout or fresh herring, or a dozen or two of eggs, to buy rum and tea, is usually said, in Charlotte Town, to be the cause of poverty in this settlement (Stanhope Cove). They certainly cannot be selling eggs in Charlotte Town market and cultivating their lands at the same time. (McGregor’s British America, Vol. I, p. 296). One finds this statement made by John McGregor in 1830 unduly censorious; in the incredibly hard life of our early settlers, tea and rum were almost their only creature comforts. Prices at this time were: — Good souchong tea, 4-6 shillings. Sugar

123