Talk:Hopewell Parish, New Brunswick

links to Pennsylvania
I just refined wikilink in the article to link to Hopewell, Chester County, Pennsylvania as the probable origin of early settlers (around 1765 when this was founded). Chester County is near the eastern seaboard and has many historic sites. I reason that the Hopewell intended is not either of Hopewell, Bedford County, Pennsylvania or Hopewell, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania because they are further west and were not settled yet. -- do ncr  am  01:12, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Hellow Doncram< It is more likely that the choice of the name is a result of the settlement proponents, not the original settlers themselves. From what I've come to understand from scholarly articles and biographies, the Hopewell name choice relates to the proprietors, (Adam Hoops and Co.), who where of Swiss and German descent.--Placeographer77 (talk) 12:59, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Need for new entry for Hopewell Township?
Consider, since this page aims to discuss the Parish (as sort of a vestigal vessel for current organizational units), that a separate entry on its origns, the Hopewell Township, would be appropriate. It is certainly of interest to the topic however does little to develop the Parish in its current context. In terms of governemtn and local representation, a discussion of the colonial government's approach to representation in the assembly, as well as local authority might also be of value. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Placeographer77 (talk • contribs) 13:32, 16 March 2021 (UTC)


 * I went through this with another editor, who grossly misunderstood the nature of the province's parish system. Please follow the wikilink to the civil parishes article and read the preamble there.


 * It would be nice to have articles on the pre-Loyalist towships but there's almost nothing out there. The Provincial Archives of New Brunswick seems to have lost the documents William F. Ganong refers to that detailed the boundaries of the township grants. There would be so little unique information for each township that it would make more sense to do an overview article with notes on each of the township. You can find Ganong's works as free downloads on Canadiana.ca; fair warning that the most useful one, the monograph on boundary development, has to be download as individual pages.


 * I disagree with another editor's comment that "Parish name origins are from the historic township. It is misleading and erroneous" as many parishes adopted their names from preëxisting sources, whether townships, grant settlements or major communities. It would be more reasonable to note that a name predated the parish in cases where this happened than to create a separate category.


 * Please change things back to how I had them. These changes are not helpful to anything other than turning this page's layout into a category of one. G. Timothy Walton (talk) 17:12, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

The invitation, although off the topic of creating an entry for the hopewell township, is appreciated. The condescension is not. These changes are helpful in improving the entry's accuracy and readability. Your apparent need to rubber stamp the entry can only realistically show a proprietary outlook on your part which is inappropriate unless you can point me to the discussion of the need for layout uniformity - what I believe you mean by "category of one".

You write, ":It would be nice to have articles on the pre-Loyalist towships but there's almost nothing out there. The Provincial Archives of New Brunswick seems to have lost the documents William F. Ganong refers to that detailed the boundaries of the township grants. There would be so little unique information for each township that it would make more sense to do an overview article with notes on each of the township. You can find Ganong's works as free downloads on Canadiana.ca; fair warning that the most useful one, the monograph on boundary development, has to be download as individual pages.:It would be nice to have articles on the pre-Loyalist towships but there's almost nothing out there. The Provincial Archives of New Brunswick seems to have lost the documents William F. Ganong refers to that detailed the boundaries of the township grants. There would be so little unique information for each township that it would make more sense to do an overview article with notes on each of the township. You can find Ganong's works as free downloads on Canadiana.ca; fair warning that the most useful one, the monograph on boundary development, has to be download as individual pages."

These speculations and conjecture are baffling. How then does a single township grant become the doctoral projects? Are you so unaware as to think there are not routes to accessing the information from the records of the past? Try looking for diaries. Correspondences. Etc. etc. What, is Ganong is not the only source? Do you think it is completely accurate? Many researchers since have had the benefit of access to what scholarly work and time have reveled. The original sources of boundaries are in the grants themselves, contained in a number of locations, and made available by the scholarly work of anyone willing to go to the truouble to access them. Besides, it is not necessary for there to be entries for each township (or all) for there to be just one i.e. Hopewell. I can't imagine you mean you expect there cannot be a history unique to a parish or township.

Thank you for your reading suggestions. I am going to offer you a suggestion as well. Not to counter your reading suggestions, but to give you another source to draw upon (which one would also find in the first referenced work in the history section of this article). Also at Canadian.ca, is the amazing resource of the Chignecto Post news print, which, being scanned from microfiche, can allow you to read such original works as the selected entries of the 1770 William Calhoun diary from the comfort of your computer.

--Placeographer77 (talk) 19:28, 16 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Any condescension was unintentional, the result of an unexpected time crunch combined with some baggage from dealing with an editor who'd apparently reached all his conclusions from post-1960 information. I tried to write a decent description of my plans last night but was unsatisfied with the result.


 * Ganong is what I'm most familiar with; not perfect but better than PANB, who claimed to lack the pre-Loyalist documents describing the boundaries of the Township grants when I contacted them last year. Rayburn built upon Ganong but I was able to easily pick out errors when I first read it about twenty years ago. I certainly welcome any improvement. I'm hoping that today's rewrite of the Origin of name section shows why it makes sense to have a separate section. Specifics are usually better than barebones but I worked with what I had available.


 * A mea culpa on assuming a lack of access to some of these source materials. My sporadic involvement with this material dates back to pre-internet days when the material was available only in archives and special collections and I was dirt poor and limited in travel. To save further time: rationalisation, justification, weak defense on my part.


 * Please, do improve my work here. I think I've made some improvements in the parish articles despite my stilted writing but there's definitely room for improvement. G. Timothy Walton (talk) 20:23, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

@G. Timothy Walton, You appear to need to allow that something can be true/have sufficient truth, even if you do not possess that information. I appreciate that you have asked for citations, and I appreciate this method of challenging the information. I don't so much appreciate the rollbacks.

i.e. Your experiences with PANB do not conclude for me the information cannot be confirmed. It is illustrative of what you find acceptible that, if it is not in the Ganong papers, it cannot be confirmed. When, since these are pre-New Brunswick grants, naturally they would be Nova Scotia records housed at lands and records as well as the provincila archives on Dalhousie Campus. But these are not the only records, and the records can be accessed in other ways.

we are looking for verifiable information. I have verified to you the origins of the shared boundary between Hopewell parish and Saint John County. You will see that despite the challenges, it is possible to veryify, even if you have yet to do so. Placeographer77 (talk) 17:05, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

@Placeographer77 Another time crunch, so forgive any impression of negativity.

I misremembered who I asked for scans of the grants. I actually contacted the New Brunswick Legislative Library, who directed me to their Nova Scotia counterpart, who could not help me. I'd have to check my e-mail archives to see if I continued on to PANS.

The information I had on the page is all verified by the cited Acts which erected the counties and parishes; these had the exact boundaries. If you need further verification, Ganong has maps showing both 1785 (or 86) parish boundaries and the 1836, as well as a single map with all the changing county lines on it. I don't know of anyone who's done updated versions that are accurate but I've seen several that are wildly off.

I will ask that you please put back the information on the boundary changes for Hopewell, as it is properly cited with the legislation that enacted the changes, which in this case are very easy to understand. There may have been another adjustment in 1850 but that Act rewrote all the parish boundaries in a way that makes directed comparison useless and I've only started poring over it with Northumberland County. G. Timothy Walton (talk) 17:29, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

Erection date.
Rather than yet another edit war, I'd ask that citation be read because there it states that the Act was published in 1786. Where this 1785 date comes from, I have no idea.

While the Letters Patent erecting the counties were granted in 1785, they were superseded by the first Act the New Brunswick Legislature passed in 1786. 1786-1823 Acts at Canadiana is a reasonably clear copy. Note that the 1785 Letters Patent quoted for Saint John mentioned Hopewell Township, not Hopewell Parish.

Please produce a verifiable source for a 1785 date before changing it back. G. Timothy Walton (talk) 23:34, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

Value of 1850 speculation
There may have been an adjustment in 1850; the question is whether mentioning the northern boundary's prolongation striking a bit north of the old referent of the tip of land where the two rivers meet is of value when considering the possible adjustment. Whether there was a change in the northern line of Hopewell is difficult to determine. Due to magnetic declination most of the province's internal boundaries are off by about 20º counterclockwise when viewed on the cadastral grant maps, so due west would look like west-southwest. The lack of a large-scale map makes it difficult to be sure and there's a decent chance the original boundaries were never properly surveyed before 1850.

I honestly don't know the value of the terminal sentence. I do know having the paragraph without some sentence justifying its use makes no sense. I can't see anywhere to shoehorn in a footnote.

I value completeness and when I go to Wikipedia I like finding information that would otherwise take hours to root out if it's online at all. I doubt I'm the only one. G. Timothy Walton (talk) 18:55, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

@G. Timothy Walton Why is this worthy of anyone's time? why give yourself or anyone that exercise? What was the magnet of the year 1850? 1789? Are you limiting the tools at your disposal? consider field evidence? lol Robert Dickson and Jesse Converse knew where the northern boundary of the grant was in order to possess land bounded by it. as did successors. as did subsequent grant recipients. Existing lines through the wilderness were valuable. and they knew how to run a straight line back then.

Measuring twenty miles would have been more challenging, what with ups and downs and egad gorges. So what did you do, measure with the tool on geonb browser? btw. the crown grant index you link to is considerably erroneous with regard to grant jurisdictions. Coffin grants in Alma parish, Albert cty? I think not. As an existing line the parish boundary served sufficiently for saint john county, and to orient grant lines upon. Notice the development pattern around the grant lines.

Where are you concerning yourself with the local gov't reform undertakings by the Higgs gov't?Spooninpot (talk) 13:28, 8 April 2021 (UTC)


 * @Spooninpot You seem to be making some assumptions as well.


 * I use the NOAA's magnetic declination calculator.
 * I use the tools I know about and can access without paying.
 * Field evidence is what, exactly?
 * Grant lines didn't always abut parish or county lines. If you want an example of initial surveys being off, read up on the running of the NB-Maine boundary north of Mars Hill. Or reread it, if it would be condescending to assume you haven't.
 * What are you on about with the Coffin grants? There are none listed in the Index to Land Grants for Albert or Alma.
 * You'll have to explain the Saint John County thing. Are you assuming that grant line automatically equals parish line is a perfect tool for placing a line that may not have been surveyed for decades? That every grant surveyor got the unrun parish boundaries right? That the convenient for you must be what's right? Produce evidence or stop claiming your assumption trumps what can be inferred from available evidence. Find a map of better scale than DesBarres used. Something useful that's available without traveling to several archives.
 * Higgs will only affect the local service districts not parishes and will probably prove to be vapourware. I'll deal with it if it gets off the ground. G. Timothy Walton (talk) 15:41, 8 April 2021 (UTC)


 * @Spooninpot A rough calculation, using the cadastral map of the area and the NOAA Magnetic Declination calculator, and a partial logic chain.


 * Magnetic declination in 1765 was 14' and maybe 20"
 * The cadastral map boundary line runs at roughly 11'18" from grid due west.
 * This is not indicative of exactly the same line. (I wrote to DNR earlier and got the answer that the cadastral map grid does match true north-south based on the centreline of the province.)
 * The southern boundary of Hillsborough was similarly rewritten but the distance inland and the angle of the western boundary both read like they were based on the 1765 township boundaries.
 * Carlisle dates to a block of regranted land from 1811. The southern line of the block matches the prolongation of Carlisle but inland grants, generally surveyed later, do not, even though by your point earlier it should be more convenient to use parish lines when laying grants.
 * As an aside, the boundary between Harvey and Alma was not created until 17 years after Harvey was established, more than enough time for it to be forgotten if unsurveyed or discarded if found less convenient than using a new line based on grants as they existed in 1855 rather than 1838. With so much of they area reconveyed or first conveyed after the Saint John County boundary was changed there's little of use in the Index to Land Grants.
 * I'm not saying you're wrong, just that the evidence available online more strongly favours my position. I'd certainly welcome a map of larger scale than DesBarres used or online material that isn't riddled with anachronisms and blatant editing errors.
 * G. Timothy Walton (talk) 16:55, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
 * @G. Timothy Walton Does it? "The western line of Hopewell was probably near Owls Head rather than the modern boundary of Alma and Harvey Parish" because, 1, I interpolated location an old hand-drawn map, and, 2, I found a piece of information that also supports that interpretation.
 * One can welcome all sorts of things as if they are the arbitrator and still not get it right. I welcome you to ponder how your reading of the adaptation of the DesBarres map would show the Hopewell township western boundary at a head when it is a clearly meeting the coast at what is drawn cove-like.
 * That supportive piece of information is contradicted by a nearby grant of 1837 that is equally far east according to the geonb grant reference map and is said to be a St. Martins parish grant in the archival of grants, seen here https://archives.gnb.ca/Search/RS686/Details.aspx?culture=en-CA&Key=15009
 * Keep it readable, good man! BTW, where have you seen fit to deal with the obliteration of the local boundaries described by the parishes? Spooninpot (talk) 21:52, 1 May 2022 (UTC)
 * 1) Re: Owls Head - present a better argument than "it must have been this other boundary because it's more convenient that it ran along grant lines that still exist". Regrants of Loyalist and pre-Loyalist large grants were common, as was changing parish boundaries to run along grants made after a parish was erected. Twenty miles from the Petitcodiac and turn 90º produces a line striking the coast near Owls Head. I'd welcome being proven wrong because it's a learning opportunity.
 * 2) Check exactly where a grant was and nearby grants of the same period before concluding it's a strong piece of evidence. The Glebe grant you mention would straddle a line from Owl Head.
 * 3) Unless the Territorial Division Act is repealed, the parishes will still exist when the local government reforms take place. If you're referring to the LSD boundaries, that's to be dealt with when the appropriate Regulation is issued in June; the earlier reports from the province mainly omitted that the new municipalities will exclude many Crown lands that are within the LSDs. G. Timothy Walton

@G. Timothy Walton 1) This is moot. We're just looking for a discussion of evolution of boundaries that does not start off with "probably there was more likely a line here" as if readers will be party to some big debate going on. So there's no bone to pick with you here and I relinquish any claim to the Alma/Harvey boundary having been the Hopewell/Saint John boundary. That said, I don't believe you have a strong argument. So what is it you want to present without getting lost in the minutia? 2) None of these grant's will be strong pieces of evidence for this time period given the nature of the situation. You'll see also on the grant reference map notes that also say St. J, or W if you would like to add that to your interpretations. 3) The laws without application? You have a vestigal tailbone, too. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Spooninpot (talk • contribs) 11:34, 7 May 2022 (UTC)
 * @Spooninpot "Laws without application". What a fatuous phrase to obscure not understanding how existing laws apply. It fits well with the obvious lack of understanding of how laws worked in the nineteenth century. G. Timothy Walton (talk) 16:01, 7 May 2022 (UTC)