Daniel Morrison, Farmer and Justice of the Peace, Five Islands
- 18 hours ago
- 5 min read
United States 10¢ green Washington, Scott # 68, 1861 issue, on a cover mailed September 13, 1865, from Pembroke, Maine, to Daniel Morrison Esq., Five Islands, N.S., County Colchester. A manuscript “15 cts” is written at the top of the cover. Backstamped H(alifax), N.S., SP 15 1865, and LONDONDERRY, N.S., SE 18 1865 — five days end to end from the Maine border to Colchester County, by way of Halifax and Londonderry. No corner card identifies the sender, and nothing found so far connects the Morrison family to Pembroke or Washington County, Maine specifically; Pembroke sits directly across Passamaquoddy Bay from the New Brunswick shore, and cross-border shipping and trade between that stretch of the Maine coast and the Bay of Fundy side of Nova Scotia was routine enough in the 1860s that the letter needn't reflect a family tie at all. The 10¢ stamp matches the standard half-ounce rate set by the 1851 US postal arrangement covering British North America, but the manuscript “15 cts” — five cents beyond that — isn't fully explained: it may record a partial prepayment with a balance collected from Daniel on delivery, the same pattern seen elsewhere in this collection, though nothing found confirms that reading was Nova Scotia's own practice specifically rather than the general Canada-facing rate.
Five Islands
Five Islands takes its name from the small cluster just offshore — Moose, Diamond, Long, Egg, and Pinnacle — exposed remnants of the same North Mountain basalt that shapes so much of the Bay of Fundy shoreline. The district sits within the broader wave of New England Planter resettlement that followed the 1755 Acadian deportation: recruiters like Alexander McNutt brought Planter families into the Cobequid Bay townships beginning in the late 1750s, Truro among them, formally settled in 1761 on former Acadian farmland. Five Islands itself is less precisely dated in the record, but its best-documented early settler, a Scottish immigrant named John Ruff, was already clearing land and farming Moose Island in the early 1800s, supplying the coastal village with produce, wood, and charcoal — right around the time Daniel Morrison's own father was bringing his family into the district. Ruff's own story ends darkly: he was reputed to treat his family harshly, died violently under suspicious circumstances, and his own son stood trial for it and was acquitted, the family relocating to the mainland soon after. By the later 1800s the district had added industry to its farming and fishing economy — a barite mine on the Bass River fed a paint factory at Lower Five Islands, shipping product on to Halifax and the United States.
The Morisons of Truro and Londonderry
Daniel Morrison's family did not arrive at Five Islands as first settlers; they arrived as part of an already well-established Nova Scotia line stretching back four generations. His great-great-grandfather, John Morison, was born in Scotland around 1628 by family tradition, later lived in Ireland, and as a young man was among the Protestant defenders driven beneath the walls during the 1689 Siege of Londonderry — enduring near-starvation before the city was relieved. He emigrated to America around 1720 and became a founding settler of Londonderry, New Hampshire, named directly for the Irish city his family had survived the siege in.
His son, known in the family history as “Charter John” Morison, was one of the first sixteen settlers of that New Hampshire township in 1719. And Charter John's own son — Capt. John Morison — is the direct bridge into Nova Scotia. Trained as a blacksmith, Capt. John served as a militia lieutenant in the 1759 expedition from Boston against the French fortress at Louisbourg, Cape Breton Island. The following year he was among sixteen families who went to found Truro, Nova Scotia, on former Acadian land around Cobequid Bay; there he and Alexander Miller built the district's first English-run flour mill, and Morison built its first two-story house, with lumber hauled up from Boston. In 1767–68 he moved on again, this time to found Londonderry, N.S. itself, where he spent most of the rest of his life — elected the town's first representative to the Nova Scotia Assembly, serving seven years, and, like his great-grandson three generations later, a justice of the peace. He died at Londonderry, N.S., in 1816, aged 91.
Capt. John's son Jonathan, born at Truro in 1766, married Martha Faulkner in 1794 and settled first on crown land at Westchester Mountain before moving the family on to Five Islands, where he bought a farm described in the family history as “fifty rods wide and six miles long” — a narrow, ribbon-shaped grant typical of the period's land surveys. Jonathan died at Five Islands in 1843; his son Daniel — this cover's recipient — was the fifth generation of the family in Nova Scotia, and the third to be born within sight of a place called Londonderry.
Daniel Morrison
Daniel Morrison was born December 2, 1802, at Londonderry, N.S. He inherited half his father's property at Five Islands and, according to the family history, “possessed sound judgment, a strong memory, and was an influential man” — serving as a justice of the peace for many years, the same office his great-grandfather Capt. John had held two generations before. He married Mary Fulmore in 1832, and the couple raised nine children on the Five Islands homestead over the following two decades. When this letter reached him in September 1865, at 62, he was a long-settled figure in the district — precisely the kind of man local usage would address as “Esquire” regardless of any formal legal training, on the strength of his office alone.
The children's later lives ranged far beyond the farm. Thomas Reed Morrison became a farmer and sea-captain, echoing his great-great-uncle John's own seafaring life — that John, Capt. John's son and Daniel's uncle, had been a schooner master lost in a storm near Londonderry in 1798. Priscilla married a Londonderry miller and settled there herself, a fourth family thread running through that same small place. And Ellen married Gilbert Broderick and settled in the Sandwich Islands — Hawaii — about as far from a Colchester County farm as the 1860s allowed. The rest — Mary J., Margaret, Rebecca, Isaac B., and George B. — stayed close to home at Five Islands.
Daniel Morrison died October 27, 1873, aged 71, and was buried in the Peniel United Church Cemetery at Five Islands.
Four generations and three Londonderrys — Ireland, New Hampshire, and Nova Scotia — run through this family before this cover was ever posted, from a boy who carried messages through a besieged city in 1689 to a farmer and magistrate receiving an ordinary piece of mail from the coast of Maine a century and three quarters later. Whoever wrote from Pembroke remains unknown; everything else about the man who received it does not.
Comments