Cambridge family granted title to 100 acres in Guernsey Cove. It
must have been a red-letter day for Vere and Elizabeth when they
received that document confirming their ownership of the property.
It marked the culmination of 20 years of hard work to produce the
lumber needed to pay the bill.

The deed was a large document
measuring three feet by three feet
and was in the possession of Shirley
(Beck) Hann (1.10B.7.6.1,) when I 7
saw it about 1998. Windsor Beck,
her uncle, left the farm to Shirley
and her husband, Albert, when he
got too old to run the place and |
moved to a nursing home in Low-
er Montague. Albert and Shirley
lived in Newfoundland at that time,
but spent their summers in Guern-
sey Cove. Albert died suddenly
in March, 2005. However, they sold the Guernsey Cove property a
couple of years earlier, just after Windsor died.

Vere really started to pay attention to the political situation and
the problems with absentee landlords about the time he gained title
to his own property. The struggle for land reform was picking up
steam and Vere readily joined in. The rallying cry was “Escheat;’ the
process by which unimproved lands would revert to the Crown and
become available for reallocation. It was aimed at seizing the land
from absentee landlords and making it available to those actually liv-
ing on it and developing it.

An in depth history of the Escheat movement by Rusty Bitter-
mann, a Professor of History at St. Thomas University in Frederic-
ton, N.B., shows that Vere played a leading role. Bittermann did his
thesis on the Island land issue, and later turned it into a book, “Rural
Protest on Prince Edward Island: From British Colonization to the
Escheat Movement.”

The leader of the Escheat group was William Cooper from For-

 

Shirley Hann

4d