Eliza A. Seaman, Pugwash and Fisher's Grant, Nova Scotia
A Nova Scotia five-cent Queen Victoria carried a letter addressed in one hand to “Eliza A. Seaman, Pugwash, Care of Hon. H. G. Pineo,” and then redirected in a second hand: “Care of Geo. Seaman, Fisher's Grant, Pictou.” The reverse carries the whole chase in wax and ink — a red seal at the centre fold and four backstamps around it: Kentville FE 6 1867, N.S.; Halifax FE 7 1867, N.S.; Pugwash FE 9 1867, N.S.; and Pictou FE 13 1867, N.S. The letter was posted at Kentville, in the heart of the Cornwallis Planter country the Pineos themselves came from, routed down through Halifax, and reached Pugwash, on Cumberland County's Northumberland Strait shore, on February 9 — only to find Eliza already gone. From there it was sent on to Fisher's Grant, on the Pictou Harbour side of Pictou County, into the care of her own brother, arriving four days later on February 13. It looked, at first, like an ordinary piece of redirected domestic mail with no obvious link between its addresses — until the two names on it turned out to already be related by an earlier marriage, making the original “care of” line less a stranger's courtesy than a niece staying with family before rejoining her brother, in a letter that had itself started out from the old Pineo homeland.
A Letter Twice Addressed
The redirection is the first interesting fact about the cover, before any of the names on it are chased down at all. Eliza A. Seaman was, in the first instance, addressed at Pugwash care of the Hon. H. G. Pineo — not a stranger's household, as the marriage record below makes clear, but her own aunt and uncle's. By the time the letter reached Pugwash, on February 9, she had already left it: someone, arriving at that conclusion either from her own instructions or from what the Pineo household could tell them, redirected the letter on to “Care of Geo. Seaman, Fisher's Grant, Pictou” — not merely “Pictou,” the county town, but Fisher's Grant, a named locality on the Pictou Landing side of the harbour, and a named brother to receive her there, where it finally arrived on February 13, a full week after being posted at Kentville. The five-cent rate belongs to Nova Scotia's own pre-Confederation postal administration, current for barely a further five months: the colony's post office, and its own stamps, passed to the new Dominion of Canada on July 1, 1867, so this cover was mailed within the last winter Nova Scotia would run its own mails at all.
The Hon. Henry Gesner Pineo
The man named as Eliza's first host, at Pugwash, is Henry Gesner Pineo (1798–1874), and the “Hon.” on the cover is not a courtesy title but a precisely dateable one. A Nova Scotia government directory for 1867 — the very year of this cover — lists the colony's Legislative Council by name and post office address, and there he is: “Henry Gesner Pineo . . . Wallace,” a Cumberland County village a short distance from Pugwash. The same directory's House of Assembly roster, on the facing page, lists Cumberland County's two elected members as “Amos Purdy . . . Wallace” and “H. G. Pineo . . . Pugwash” — the second seat filled that year by the elder Pineo's own son, Henry Gesner Pineo Jr. (1830–1874), a Pugwash-born Conservative who took his father's home town as his own postal address on entering the Assembly, and who went on to hold consular appointments for the United States and for Sweden and Norway and to rise to lieutenant-colonel in the militia. Father sat in the appointed upper chamber, son in the elected lower one, in the same legislature, the same year this letter went looking for Eliza Seaman — a tidy, independently dated confirmation of exactly who “Hon. H. G. Pineo” had to be, and close enough to Pugwash itself, Wallace being a short distance along the same shore, that the elder Pineo keeping a household there is no stretch at all.
Cornwallis and the New England Planters
Henry Gesner Pineo was a son of David Sampson Pineo (1770–1838) of Cornwallis, Kings County, and his wife Annie Huntley, and a grandson, in turn, of David Pineo (1747–1843), a New England Planter born at Lebanon, in New London County, Connecticut, who had settled at Cornwallis with his own father's generation in the resettlement of the Minas Basin lands vacated by the Crown's expulsion of the Acadian population in 1755. Cornwallis Township was one of the principal Planter townships, granted and settled from 1760, and it was here that the transplanted Connecticut family put down roots alongside other New England names arriving in the same wave. By the 1860s the grandsons of the original Planter grantees were as likely to be found in a legislative council chamber in Halifax as behind a plough in Cornwallis — Henry Gesner Pineo's own career, and his son's beside him in the Assembly, being a case very much in point.
Fisher's Grant and Pictou Harbour
Fisher's Grant takes its name from a 20,000-acre tract granted in October 1765 to John Fisher, reputed a major in the British army, on the north side of Pictou Harbour near what is now Pictou Landing — one of five large original grants that opened the harbour's shores to settlement in the same decade Pictou itself was founded by Philadelphia colonists aboard the ship Hector. By the 1860s the name had long since detached itself from any single proprietor and simply denoted the locality, a short water crossing from the town of Pictou proper — evidently where George Seaman, still in his twenties, had found himself in the winter of 1867, before the record picks him up again some years later back on the Cumberland shore.
The Seamans of Pugwash
Eliza and George Seaman were sister and brother, children of Abraham Seaman and his wife Nancy Rebecca, married January 15, 1833; she died September 18, 1879, he on July 15, 1880. A genealogical record of the family lists their children in order: Joseph Allenson, born and died in 1835; George, born August 31, 1837; Charles, born 1839, died 1853; Clifford, born 1842, died 1899; Eliza Allison, born July 28, 1844; and Amelia, born 1847, died 1861. George — the brother to whose care this letter was finally redirected at Fisher's Grant — turns up four years later, in the 1871 census, back at Pugwash, Cumberland County, aged 33, a bookkeeper, with his wife Rebecca (they had married December 3, 1863, her maiden name McNutt) and three young children, Minnie, Charles, and Emma. By the 1881 census the family had left Pugwash for Canard, in Kings County — back, that is, to the same Cornwallis-area Planter country the Pineos called home — George now 43, still a bookkeeper, with two more children, Ida and Clifford, added to the household. Pugwash, in other words, was the Seaman family's own settled base throughout this period; George's presence at Fisher's Grant in February 1867 reads as a young bookkeeper's temporary posting away from home, exactly the kind of absence that would leave a letter chasing him down.
New Minas, and a Likely Sender
A Nova Scotia business directory of the period places Abraham Seaman himself as a farmer at New Minas, in Kings County — a small farming community immediately next to Kentville, close enough that New Minas's own mail would naturally have gone out through the larger town's post office. The same directory page lists three Pineo men farming at New Minas as well — David, Frederic, and Jonathan — and a Seaman named Jaconiah, almost certainly the “Jeconiah Seaman” already noted above as the second husband, in 1821, of a mother connected to the Pineo family. Pineos and Seamans, in other words, were not distant kin trading letters across the province so much as literal neighbours in one small Kings County farming community for at least two generations before Henry Gesner Pineo ever married Harriet Seaman in 1828. Given that this letter was posted at Kentville on February 6 — the nearest post office to the Seaman farm at New Minas — it was very probably written by one of Eliza's own parents, Abraham or Nancy Rebecca, or by one of the siblings still living at home, checking in on a daughter and sister who had gone off to stay first with her aunt and uncle on the Cumberland shore and then with her brother in Pictou County.
The Rev. Samuel Bradford Kempton
Eliza herself — “Eliza A. Seaman” on this cover, still unmarried in February 1867 — married within the year, on or about October 1, 1867, at not quite twenty-three. Her husband was the Rev. Samuel Bradford Kempton, born in 1834 at Milton, in Queens County, and educated at Acadia University, from which he took his M.A. and, eventually, an honorary D.D. His own family had been in Nova Scotia even longer than the Pineos: his ancestor Richard Kempton (1739–1809) served in the New England forces that took Quebec under General Wolfe in 1759, returned home to Massachusetts for his discharge, and in the spring of 1761 loaded a vessel with building material at Plymouth and sailed north to become one of the founding proprietors of the Township of Liverpool — a Planter arrival barely a year or two behind the Pineos' own at Cornwallis. Ordained to the Baptist ministry, the younger Kempton's first pastorate was fittingly close to home: the Baptist church at New Minas itself, the very farming community where Abraham Seaman kept his household a few miles from Kentville — and it was there, not in some more distant match, that he married Eliza. He went on to the pastorate of the First Cornwallis Baptist Church at Canard, where he spent twenty-six happy and fruitful years by his own congregation's later account, and closed his career with a further fifteen years at Dartmouth, dying there on October 29, 1918, at eighty-four, survived by Eliza and by their son.
That son, the Rev. Austen Tremaize Kempton, was born at Upper Canard on February 6, 1870, attended public school at Milton and Horton Academy before graduating from Acadia College in 1891, and was licensed to preach by his own father in 1886, while still in his teens, at the church his father served; his father ordained him in turn, at Milton, on August 13, 1893. He married Lottie Helena Freeman of Milton, daughter of Samuel and Charlotte (Freeman) Freeman, and the couple had two sons, Samuel Bradford Kempton, born at Sharon, Massachusetts, in January 1895, and Lawrence Hay Kempton, born at Fitchburg, Massachusetts, in April 1899. Austen's own pastorates ran from Milton, Nova Scotia, to Sharon and to Stoughton Street, Boston, and finally to Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and he became locally well known as a lecturer, authoring illustrated talks on “Nova Scotia, the Romantic Land of Evangeline,” on “The Land of the Loyalists,” and on the two poems, Evangeline and Miles Standish, that had done so much to fix the region's romantic image in the American mind — a grandson of Abraham and Nancy Rebecca Seaman making a modest living, two generations later, retelling to American congregations the very Acadian story whose aftermath had first brought the Pineos to Cornwallis in the first place.
The Marriage That Explains the Cover
It turns out not to be a distant or roundabout connection at all. The Nova Scotia marriage register for 1763–1945 records, in plain terms, a marriage at Amherst, Cumberland County, on December 18, 1828: Henry G. Pineo to Harriet Seaman. The date and place fit Henry Gesner Pineo (1798–1874) precisely — thirty years old, marrying in the shire town of his own Cumberland County seat — and the timing fits what is already known of his family just as well: his son Henry Gesner Pineo Jr. was born in 1830, almost exactly two years after this marriage, which is exactly when a first son would be expected to arrive. Hon. H. G. Pineo, in other words, was not a family friend or a political grandee doing a Seaman girl an incidental kindness; he had married a Seaman himself, close to forty years earlier, and in all likelihood was Eliza and George's own uncle by marriage — Harriet Seaman's exact relationship to Abraham Seaman is not yet independently confirmed, but a Seaman marrying a Pineo out of the same small Cumberland County world the Seamans themselves came from is far more likely to be family than coincidence. The genealogical appendix's separate, earlier hint of a Pineo-connected mother remarrying into the Seaman name in 1821 may well be a related strand of the same extended family rather than a competing explanation; either way, the 1828 marriage record alone is enough to settle why a letter addressed care of the Hon. H. G. Pineo at Pugwash was, within days, redirected care of George Seaman at Fisher's Grant. Eliza had not been staying with a stranger's household while a delivery caught up with her. She had been staying with her aunt and uncle, and was redirected on from there to her own brother.
Comments