Joseph Sparrow Thompson, Clerk, Halifax
This cover left Halifax in January 1866, franked with a single 10-cent vermilion Queen Victoria and endorsed by the sender “Per Steamer Asia via Boston”. It is addressed to Mr Joseph Thomson, Care of Mr W. C. Williams, 179 West Street, New York U.S. On its own it is a tidy example of the cross-border rate to the United States. Following the addressee, however, leads to a Halifax family with an unusually close connection to the Nova Scotia Post Office, and to a younger brother who would become Prime Minister of Canada.
The Stamp and the Rate
The 10-cent vermilion belongs to the 1860 decimal issue of Nova Scotia. It pays the 10-cent rate for a single-weight letter to the United States. That rate came from the arrangement between the United States and the British North American provinces introduced in 1851, which set 10 cents per half ounce for distances under 3,000 miles. The stamp is cancelled with a barred grid of the usual Nova Scotia type.
Per Steamer Asia via Boston
The routing endorsement names the Cunard steamer Asia, which called at Halifax on the run from Liverpool to Boston. The backstamp shows the letter was in the Halifax office on 18 January 1866. The front carries a BOSTON BR. PKT. datestamp of 22 January, the marking applied at Boston to mail landed from the British (Cunard) packets, with a trailing “6” that appears to be a year digit. From Boston the letter went on to New York.
Newspaper reports of January 1866 give the Asia’s movements exactly. Under Captain Anderson she left Liverpool on 6 January and Queenstown on the 7th, and reached Halifax at
10 o’clock on the morning of Saturday, 20 January, with eighteen passengers for Halifax and fifteen for Boston. She sailed again at four that afternoon for Boston, in thick fog. The New York Herald of 23 January reported that the European mails by the Asia had reached Boston from Halifax the previous afternoon, 22 January, and were sent on to New York that evening, due there at eight the next morning.
That fits the markings on the cover precisely. The letter was in the Halifax office on 18 January and waited two days for the Asia to arrive. It left Halifax with her on the afternoon of the 20th, was landed at Boston and struck with the BOSTON BR. PKT. datestamp on the 22nd, and would have been in New York on the morning of the 23rd. The four days between the Halifax and Boston markings were spent mostly waiting for the ship, not at sea.
The manuscript “Ans Feb 13” on the front is the recipient’s docket, recording that the letter was answered about three weeks after it reached New York.
179 West Street, New York
The street guide in the New York city directory places 179 West Street between Warren Street (176) and Chambers Street (185), on the landward side facing the Hudson River piers. This was working waterfront: piers, ferry landings, brokers, commission merchants and boarding houses. A “care of” address there suggests that Joseph Thomson had no fixed address of his own in the city and was receiving mail through a business contact.
The building at 179 West Street stood until 2003. Christopher Gray’s “Streetscapes” column in the New York Times described it as a plain, four-storey brick building, 23 feet wide, with granite lintels and a granite storefront, standing between Warren and Chambers Streets. That agrees with the 1866 street guide. It was put up in 1845 by Edward G. Faile, a grocer on Front Street. Its first known occupants, in 1851, were Theron L. Carman and Cornelius T. Nostrand, grocers who may have supplied ships or sold wholesale. The occupants in later decades are not identified, but a view of about 1880 shows the building with a large “Provisions” sign. When Joseph Thomson’s letter arrived in 1866,
179 West Street was most likely a waterfront provisions or grocery business, the kind of place that dealt daily with ships, seamen and travellers and could easily take in mail for a man passing through. W. C. Williams may well have been its proprietor or a tenant, though that remains to be confirmed.
I have not yet identified W. C. Williams. The directory pages examined so far do not show him at 179 West Street, though a firm of Williams & Morrison, brokers, is listed opposite 208 West Street, a few blocks north. Nor is there a Joseph Thompson with a West Street connection among the directory’s many Thompsons, which is consistent with a man passing through rather than settled in New York.
A Halifax Marriage
A Nova Scotia marriage register records that on 23 May 1865 at Halifax, Joseph Thompson, 26, bachelor, clerk, of Halifax, married Emma E. Hamilton, 25, spinster, also of Halifax. The groom’s father is given as J. S. Thompson of the P.O. Department. The entry also names C. W. Hamilton, apparently the bride’s father, and Rev. J. C. Cochran, apparently the officiating clergyman.
Family trees on Ancestry identify the groom as Joseph Sparrow Thompson, born 5 February 1838, son of John Sparrow Thompson and Charlotte Pottinger, and give his wife as Emma Elizabeth Hamilton; Waite’s biography confirms the marriage. The trees cite no primary sources, and two details do not quite agree with the register. A February 1838 birth would make Joseph 27, not 26, at his marriage. The trees also give Emma’s birth as 1836, while the register’s age of 25 points to about 1840. Neither discrepancy is unusual, but both are noted here.
Hutchinson’s Nova Scotia Directory for 1864–65 shows the family together at 95 Gottingen Street, a few months before the marriage. J. S. Thompson is listed as superintendent of the money order branch at the Post Office, living at number 95. John, the future Prime Minister, is a student at law with an office at 150 Hollis Street, also living at 95 Gottingen. And Joseph Thompson, clerk, boards at 95 Gottingen, which agrees with the marriage register’s description of him as a clerk. He is the only Joseph Thompson in the Halifax listings for that year.
By the Halifax directory for 1866–67 Joseph has gone. His father is still listed as superintendent of the money order branch at 95 Gottingen, and John, now “J. S. D. Thompson, barrister”, still practises at 150 Hollis and lives at the family house. There is no Joseph Thompson anywhere in the listings. His absence fits Waite’s account of his leaving for Texas in 1866, though a directory’s silence is never proof on its own.
The Thompsons and the Post Office
A J. S. Thompson in the Halifax Post Office in the 1860s can only be John Sparrow Thompson (1795–1867). Born in Waterford, Ireland, he came to Halifax in 1827 and worked as a teacher, shorthand reporter, newspaper editor and, for two periods, Queen’s Printer. He was a close friend of Joseph Howe throughout his life. In 1861 he was appointed chief of the money order department of the Nova Scotia Post Office, a post he held until shortly before his death at Halifax on 21 October 1867. He and Charlotte Pottinger married in 1829 and had seven children, two of whom seem to have died in infancy.
The youngest of those children, born in 1845, was John David Thompson, later Sir John Sparrow David Thompson, Premier of Nova Scotia and fourth Prime Minister of Canada. P. B. Waite’s biography of Sir John in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography gives a brief account of his brothers and sisters. It states that his brother Joseph emigrated to Texas in 1866 and died the following year of yellow fever.
Galveston and Yellow Fever
Waite gives a fuller account of Joseph in his biography of Sir John, The Man from Halifax (1985). After his marriage to Emma Hamilton in May 1865, Joseph emigrated with his wife to Galveston, Texas, late in 1866. The couple arrived in time for the yellow fever epidemic that swept Galveston in the summer of 1867. On 2 August Joseph wrote calmly to his brother John David, sending the family their love and, in case the worst happened, saying goodbye. He signed himself “Your bro. Joe.” Within a month both he and Emma were dead. The family trees give Joseph’s death as 1 September 1867.
It was a hard year for the family. J. S. Thompson died after a short illness on 21 October 1867, at the family house at 95 Gottingen Street. Joseph’s sister Charlotte had married Daniel Sargent, a widower from Barrington in Shelburne County, a few months earlier, and his brother William was in South Africa. At 21, John David was left to provide for his mother and his sister Elizabeth.
Is This the Same Joseph?
The case that this cover was addressed to Joseph Sparrow Thompson is strong but circumstantial.
• He was a Halifax clerk, married in May 1865, whose father was a senior official of the Nova Scotia Post Office. He is the only Joseph Thompson in the 1864–65 Halifax directory.
• Within eighteen months of his marriage, he had left Nova Scotia to settle in the United States.
• The cover is addressed “care of” a business on the New York waterfront, which suggests a man staying temporarily in the city rather than living there.
• The spelling “Thomson” on the cover is not a difficulty. The family name was recorded both ways; the 1881 census, for example, enumerated Sir John’s household as “Thomson”.
There is one point of tension. Waite dates the move to Galveston to late 1866, while the cover places a Joseph Thomson in New York in January 1866, nearly a year earlier. The most likely explanation is that Joseph made an earlier, exploratory trip to New York, perhaps to look for work or to weigh up where to settle and returned to Halifax before leaving with Emma later in the year. Waite records only the final departure, so an earlier trip would not necessarily appear in his account.
The alternative is that the cover belongs to a different Joseph Thomson. Nova Scotians went to New York and New England in large numbers in the 1860s, and the name was common. But a Joseph Thomson from Halifax, receiving mail at a temporary address in New York only months after Joseph Sparrow Thompson’s marriage and the year he left for the United States, is a close fit. Until a document places him at 179 West Street, the identification should be read as very probable rather than proven.
Further Research
Several sources could settle the question:
• Joseph’s own letter of 2 August 1867 to his brother, cited in Waite’s notes and presumably in the Sir John Thompson papers. The docket “Ans Feb 13” on this cover is in a different hand from the address and is probably the recipient’s. If it matches Joseph’s writing in the 1867 letter, the identification is effectively proven.
• The Sir John Thompson papers (LAC, MG 26, D) and the J. S. Thompson papers (LAC, MG 24, C4), for any mention of a New York trip in 1865–66, or of W. C. Williams. The Sir John Thompson papers also include a memoir of J. S. Thompson by William A. Hendry.
• The New York directory entry for W. C. Williams, which should give his business.
• Halifax newspaper notices of Joseph’s departure in 1866 or his death in 1867, and Galveston burial records for 1867.
• A comparison of the address with 1860s letters by J. S. Thompson or the young John D. Thompson, in the Thompson papers, the Joseph Howe papers (LAC, MG 24, B29) or the Thompson collection at the Nova Scotia Archives (MG 1, 1771 A). A match would be strong support, but a mismatch would prove little, since the letter could as easily have come from Emma, Joseph’s mother or one of his sisters.
If any of these turns up Joseph in New York, this post will be updated.
Sources
• P. B. Waite, “Thompson, John Sparrow,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 9. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/thompson_john_sparrow_9E.html
• P. B. Waite, “Thompson, Sir John Sparrow David,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 12. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/thompson_john_sparrow_david_12E.html
• P. B. Waite, The Man from Halifax: Sir John Thompson, Prime Minister (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 18.
• Shipping news, Portland Daily Press, 22 January 1866, p. 3; New-York Daily Tribune, 22 January 1866, p. 4; New York Herald, 23 January 1866, p. 8 (Chronicling America, Library of Congress).
• Hutchinson’s Nova Scotia Directory for 1864–65, Halifax listings, Thompson entries.
• Halifax city directory for 1866–67, Thompson entries.
• Christopher Gray, “Streetscapes: A Lonely Reminder of the Days of Waterfront Glory,” New York Times.
• SKYDB building database, 179 West Street / 200 Chambers Street, New York (accessed September 2026).
• Nova Scotia marriage register, Halifax, 23 May 1865 (Joseph Thompson and Emma E. Hamilton).
• Ancestry.com family trees for Joseph Sparrow Thompson (1838–1867), unsourced.
• New York city directory: Williams, Thompson and firm listings, and street guide for West Street.
• WikiTree, Sir John Sparrow David Thompson (census references). https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Thompson-12832
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