James Cadegan, Storekeeper, Little Glace Bay

Nova Scotia # 10 on a folded letter mailed February 11, 1867 from Halifax to Little Glace Bay, Cape Breton. Addressed to Mr James Cadegan, Little Glace Bay, Cape Breton. Endorsed “per mail” at lower left. Stamp tied with barred oval cancellation. Backstamps HALIFAX FE 11 67, LITTLE GLACE BAY FE 13 67.

The Cover

The letter is written on a folded sheet of pale blue ribbed paper, the horizontal “repp” texture visible right across the scan. It is addressed in a confident commercial hand:

Mr James Cadegan

Little Glace Bay

Cape Breton

At the lower left the sender has added “per mail”, a small instruction but a telling one. Between Halifax and the Cape Breton coal settlements there were other ways to send a letter, by coaster or in a traveller’s pocket, and the endorsement makes clear this one was to go through the Post Office.

The 5-cent blue Queen Victoria in the upper right is struck with a barred oval, most of it falling off the stamp. On the reverse, the Halifax split-ring datestamp reads FE 11 67, and the Little Glace Bay receiving stamp FE 13 67. The back flap carries a stationer’s embossing, a small diamond of raised dots, and some later pencil notations (“HAL 19”, “63”) added by collectors or dealers rather than by the Post Office.

The Rate and the Route

When Nova Scotia converted to decimal currency in 1860, the new 5-cent stamp took over from the old 3d. blue as the ordinary letter rate within the province, per half ounce. This is a straightforward single-rate inland letter. What gives it an edge is the date: February 11, 1867 was less than five months before Confederation, in the colony’s final months as a separate postal administration.

The two backstamps show the letter taking just two days to reach the far side of Cape Breton Island in mid-winter, and Lovell’s 1871 directory records a tri-weekly mail at Little Glace Bay. That is quick. Readers may remember the two covers to William McDonald of Little Glace Bay featured in an earlier BlueNotes post, mailed from Halifax in October 1866 and November 1867: both took four days. A generation earlier, in January 1847, the Halifax postmaster was reporting on the carriage of the Sydney mails by the Cunard steamer Unicorn (Nova Scotia Archives, RG 7 vol. 16 no. 7).

Baie de Glace

The French called it Baie de Glace, the bay of ice, for the drift ice that filled it in winter. They were digging coal from the cliffs here in the 1720s to supply the fortress at Louisbourg, and after the first capture of Louisbourg a small fort, Fort William, was built at Table Head to guard the workings; it burned in 1752. Permanent English-speaking settlement came later. Walter Blackett took up land on the south shore of the bay in 1818, and for the next forty years Little Glace Bay was a scattered place of farms and fishing stations.

Coal changed that, and quickly. For most of the first half of the century the London-based General Mining Association held the rights to Nova Scotia’s minerals. When its monopoly was broken in 1858, the coal lands of eastern Cape Breton were thrown open, and within a few years new mines were opening along the shore from Bridgeport to Cow Bay.

Robert Belloni, one of the operators who came in at that time, gave the Halifax Herald a first-hand account in October 1885. At Little Glace Bay the pioneer was Edward P. Archbold, “then carrying on a general trading business at Sydney”, who invested in the mining business “at a point now known as Little Glace Bay”. After working the property on his own for about two years, Archbold persuaded a Boston syndicate to put up the money both to work the mines and to open up Little Glace Bay harbour. Halifax capitalists joined in, the two groups fell out, and the Haligonians bought control. By Belloni’s account the mine went on to pay “the largest amount of dividend to its shareholders of any mine in the province – one year paying as much as forty per cent.” Readers of the BlueNotes post “55,000 Feet of Hemlock” will recognise Archbold, whose timber order set that 1864 Mahone Bay letter in motion.

The quarrel produced a second mine. The Caledonia, “contiguous to Glace Bay”, grew out of the split between the Boston and Halifax shareholders and was opened under the management of Henry Poole, formerly of the Albion mines at Pictou. It was at work by 1867, when observations were made for a scientific paper “On the meteorology of the Caledonia coal mine, Little Glace Bay”. Next door at Glace Bay proper, the Glace Bay Mining Company had been formed in 1860, and its Hub Shaft, opened in 1861, was the first substantial mine in the district. At Bridgeport, a few miles west, a slope opened in 1858 by a local partnership had passed to New York capitalists as the International Coal and Railway Company, which built a thirteen-mile railway and a wharf and spent, Belloni reckoned, about $1,500,000 before its bondholders foreclosed.

The village grew around the pits. A Catholic parish, St Augustine’s, opened its first church on 17 December 1865, a Presbyterian congregation had met since about 1850, and the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company kept an office in the village. When Lovell’s compiled its directory in 1871, Little Glace Bay was “a coal mining district on the Atlantic coast”, fifteen miles from Sydney by tri-weekly stage or semi-weekly steamer, with the Glace Bay Mining Company employing about 300 hands in a population of about 400. Archbold was listed as the company’s manager. The postmaster was William MacDonald, who was also the telegraph operator and a dealer in dry goods, groceries and provisions (not to be confused with William McDonald, the merchant and farmer of the earlier BlueNotes post). Among a handful of other traders was “Cardigan James, storekeeper”: the addressee of this cover.

The biggest change came later. The Dominion Coal Company bought up the Glace Bay mines in 1893, and on 18 January 1901 Little Glace Bay and its neighbouring mining and farming settlements were incorporated together as the Town of Glace Bay.

A Village of Storekeepers

A coal village of four hundred people and three hundred miners needed flour, pork, tea, cloth, boots and tools, and almost all of it came in by sea or by road from Halifax. The Halifax wholesalers wrote to their village customers, and some of those letters survive. This cover and the two to William McDonald are three from the same few years.

Bradstreet’s Reports of the Dominion of Canada for 1878 give a snapshot of the village’s trade a decade later. About two dozen Little Glace Bay businesses are listed with their credit ratings. At the top is Archbold, “Gen’l Store & Coal Mining”, rated “A A”. Next, at “C C”, comes “Cadegan James … Gen’l Store”. Most of the rest, the general stores of John Blackett, Richard Dobson, John Gannon and Joseph Hillier, the grocers and liquor dealers, the shoemakers and the blacksmith, carry D or E ratings. There is also “Hitchins James E. & Co., Gen’l Store”, cross-referenced “See Halifax”: a Halifax firm with a branch in the village, exactly the kind of business that would have written to a village storekeeper, although nothing on this cover names its sender. John Blackett’s name recalls the first settler of 1818. Two others, the grocer and liquor dealer Richard Rockett and a Richard Dunphy in the same trade, turn out to have married into the Cadegan family.

James Cadegan, Storekeeper

The “Cardigan” of Lovell’s is our James Cadegan. The 1871 census for the Lingan subdistrict, under which Little Glace Bay was enumerated, spells the name exactly as it appears on the cover:

Name	Sex	Age	Born	Religion	Origin	Occupation
James Cadegan	M	55	N.S.	Catholic	Irish	Storekeeper
Bridget	F	40	Ireland	Catholic	Irish
Mary	F	17	N.S.	Catholic	Irish

1871 Census of Canada, Cape Breton, Lingan (h), p. 2, dwelling 64, family 68

James was a Cape Bretoner by birth, born about 1819, and Irish Catholic by descent. His wife, Bridget Carney, was Irish-born. The baptism of their daughter Mary is indexed under yet another spelling, “James Kadigan” and “Bridget Karney”. A son born at Glace Bay in 1855 puts the family in the district well before the first big mines opened, so James appears to have been a local man who set up shop as the coal companies arrived, not a newcomer following them.

He prospered with the village. By 1881 the census calls him a merchant, and the household included his son John, aged 22 (really 25), listed as a medical student. John qualified. When Dr John C. Cadegan died at Sydney in July 1924, his death registration gave his birth as 15 July 1855 at Glace Bay and named his parents as James Cadegan, born in Cape Breton, and Bridget Carney, born in Ireland. He was buried at Glace Bay.

Bridget died at Little Glace Bay on 19 March 1894; a Halifax paper reported the death of “Bridget, wife of James Cadegan, aged 84 years”, though her census ages point to a birth nearer 1831 and the 84 may be a misprint. James is said to have died on 29 December 1905 and to be buried in the King Edward Street Pioneer Cemetery at Glace Bay, although that rests on a grave index and he has not yet been found in the 1901 census.

The Cadegans of Lingan

James was not the only Cadegan on the coal shore. William Cadigan, from the parish of Cushinstown in County Wexford, married Mary Browner of a neighbouring Wexford parish at St John’s, Newfoundland, probably in December 1816, and their daughter Catherine was baptised there. By 1838 William and Mary were farming between Lingan and Glace Bay. Their son Patrick William Cadegan, born in Cape Breton in 1820, became one of the best-known men of the district.

Patrick was, in local memory, “the first man to open a coal mine on the southern side of the harbor”. With the Rev. Dr Hugh McLeod, the Free Church minister of Mira, and George E. Burchell, he opened the slope at Bridgeport in 1858 and shipped coal from a small wharf at Deadman’s Cove. The partners, by one account, “never seemed to agree between themselves”. They sold to the New York syndicate that became the International Coal and Railway Company, and when the Dominion Coal Company bought the Cape Breton mines in 1893 a Nebraska paper reported that “’Squire Cadegan” had just been asked for proof of his long-forgotten shares. Patrick was also Bridgeport’s postmaster from 1868 to 1870, and a P. Cadegan had been the first postmaster there in 1838. On 18 September 1867, seven months after this letter, he stood for the Legislature in Cape Breton County and lost to A. J. White. In 1871 he took his family to Massachusetts and later to Nebraska, and he died at Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1907. His Cape Breton obituary called him “probably one of the best known pioneers in the country”, though it credited him, wrongly, with the Caledonia mine.

Were James and Patrick brothers? An online family tree makes all three of them William’s children, Catherine, James and Patrick, siblings, and the dates fit: Catherine born in Newfoundland in 1818, James in Nova Scotia about 1819, Patrick in 1820. But William’s will is said to name only his widow and Patrick, and no record yet names James’s parents. For now, brothers is likely but unproven.

What Remains Unresolved

•         Who James’s parents were, and whether he was Patrick’s brother.

•         Who sent this letter: a Halifax wholesaler such as James E. Hitchins & Co. is a plausible candidate, but only a guess.

•         The route and timing of the 1867 winter mail from Halifax to Little Glace Bay.

•         Where James was in the 1901 census, and whether he died in 1905.

•         Bridget Carney’s age, and when she and James married.

Sources

•         Census of Nova Scotia, 1838, Cape Breton (Lingan to Glace Bay), p. 16.

•         Census of Canada, 1871: Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, Lingan (h), p. 2.

•         Census of Canada, 1881: Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, Lingan (I).

•         Lovell’s Province of Nova Scotia Directory for 1871, entry for Little Glace Bay, C.B.

•         Bradstreet’s Reports of the Dominion of Canada (New York: The Bradstreet Company, 1878), Little Glace Bay.

•         “How $2,000,000 Were Lost: Mr. Belloni’s Reminiscences of Cape Breton,” Halifax Herald, 21 October 1885, p. 2.

•         Nova Scotia Archives, RG 7 vol. 16 no. 7: Post Master at Halifax reporting regular conveyance of mail by the Steamship Unicorn to Sydney, 12 January 1847.

•         “On the meteorology of the Caledonia coal mine, Little Glace Bay, Cape Breton, in 1867,” DalSpace, Dalhousie University.

•         “William McDonald, Merchant and Farmer, Little Glace Bay,” The BlueNotes (thebluenotes2.com).

•         “Glace Bay,” Wikipedia (Glace Bay Mining Company, 1860; Hub Shaft, 1861).

•         Province of Nova Scotia, Certificate of Registration of Death, 1924, book 79, page 513: Dr John C. Cadegan.

•         Nova Scotia, Antigonish Catholic Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials, 1823–1905 (Ancestry index): baptism of Mary Kadigan.

•         The Evening Mail (Halifax), 29 March 1894, p. 8: death of Bridget, wife of James Cadegan.

•         Find a Grave index: James Cadegan, d. 29 Dec 1905, King Edward Street Pioneer Cemetery, Glace Bay.

•         Newfoundland, Church Records, 1793–1899 (Ancestry): St John’s Catholic marriage of William Cadigan and Mary Browner, and baptism of their daughter Catherine.

•         Cape Breton Post, 11 November 1907: obituary of Patrick Cadegan.

•         Greeley Herald (Nebraska), c. 1893: item on “’Squire Cadegan of Brayton”.

•         C. M. Odell, Men and Methods of the Early Days of Mining in Cape Breton; Eugene Lambert, notes on Patrick William Cadegan (2006).