Mary Lavers Gets a Letter from Home
Updated: Aug 26
Nova Scotia # 9 (the 2c county rate) on 22 October 1864 cover from Newport to Windsor, Nova Scotia. Addressed to Miss Mary Lavers, Windsor, N S. Manuscript notation on front "To the care of William M. Stevens". Backstamps Newport OC 22 1864, Windsor, OC 24 64.
Mary Lavers, Domestic Servant, Windsor
uncovering Nova Scotia history, one envelope at a time
[Image: cover front — NS #9, Newport to Windsor, 22 Oct 1864]
[Image: cover back / backstamps]
Nova Scotia #9 (the 2¢ county rate) on a 22 October 1864 cover from Newport to Windsor, Nova Scotia. Addressed to Miss Mary Lavers, Windsor, N.S., with the manuscript notation "To the care of William M. Stevens." Backstamped Newport OC 22 1864 and Windsor OC 24 64.
Seventeen-year-old Mary Lavers was likely working as a domestic servant for the William Stevens family in Windsor, Nova Scotia when she received this letter. The letter, with its whimsically decorated front, appears to be from a close friend or family member — a small, personal piece of mail reaching a young woman living and working away from home.
A Childhood Shaped by Loss and Remarriage
Mary was born about 1847 in Upper Rawdon (family records give 25 October 1848, but her age as recorded in the 1866 marriage register and in three later censuses points consistently to 1847) to Alexander "Sandy" MacDonald Lavers, a shoemaker, and his wife, Sarah Melinda Sanford, of West Gore. Her father died on 19 January 1853, when Mary was not yet five. Her mother remarried around 1854, to John Robert Fenton of Upper Rawdon, and Mary grew up alongside four Fenton half-siblings — Agnes, Eunice, and Lois Amelia among them — in a blended household in the same corner of Hants County the Lavers and Sanford families had farmed for generations.
This also settles a small puzzle in the record: Mary's 1866 marriage registration names her parents as "Alexander and Matilda Lavers." No Matilda appears anywhere else in the family's documented history, and the name is a natural misreading of "Melinda" — Sarah Melinda Sanford's own middle name, and evidently the one she went by. Read that way, the marriage record and the family's fuller history agree.
Marriage and Family
On 22 November 1866, at the Baptist Church in Rawdon, Mary Lavers, age 19, married James Henry Murdock, a 24-year-old carpenter, son of Henry and Mary Murdock of Douglas, N.S. Two years after receiving this letter, Mary had left service in Windsor and started a household of her own in Hants County.
By the 1871 census, the couple had settled in Noel, Hants County, where James, 29, worked as a carpenter — a useful trade in a community built around shipbuilding. Noel Bay had several shipyards through the 1860s and 70s, the most prominent being the Osmond O'Brien yard, which launched twenty vessels, the largest of them the barque Amanda, sailed out of the bay by Captain William Scott of Minasville. The Murdocks, with young daughters Estella (3) and Emily (1), were living with James's widowed father, Henry, also a carpenter.
By 1881 the family had moved to Gore, a farming community in the Rawdon Hills, and grown: James, 38, carpenter, and Mary, 33, now had six children — Estella, 13; Emily, 11; Selina, 9; Franklin, 7; Myron, 4; and Everet, 2 — plus a fifth-month-old daughter, also named Mary. Gore was once home to the East Hants Courthouse, which stood on the community's Courthouse Hill for ninety years until fire destroyed it in 1956.
The Disciples of Christ at Rawdon and West Gore
The 1871, 1881, and 1891 censuses each record the Murdock family's religion as Disciples of Christ — a detail worth pausing on, since it ties the family to one of the more distinctive religious movements to take root in Hants County.
The Disciples of Christ trace back to the American "Restoration Movement" (also called the Stone-Campbell Movement) of the early nineteenth century, led independently by Barton W. Stone in Kentucky and by Thomas and Alexander Campbell in western Pennsylvania before the two streams joined in fellowship in 1832. Both groups rejected human creeds and denominational labels, insisting on the Bible alone as "the only rule of faith and practice" and on a return to New Testament-era church practice — a stance summed up in the movement's motto, "Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent."
The movement reached the Maritimes early — as far back as 1810, carried in part by Baptists of Scottish background — and Nova Scotia developed its own local version of the same story told in the Rawdon congregation's own history:
"The Reformation was started between 1832 and 1835, by John McDonald, whilst he was a member of the Baptist church. An earnest student of the New Testament, he became dissatisfied . . . and severed his connection . . . and with twenty-five or twenty-six of its members (including the pastor John Doyle) formed a separate body, taking the Bible only for their rule of faith and practice." — John McDonald
American evangelist Elder Benjamin Howard visited Rawdon in the winter of 1837 at the invitation of members who had already left the Baptists with McDonald, and twenty more were added to the group during his stay. The congregation grew to forty-six members meeting from house to house across West Gore, Rawdon, and Newport — some walking three to nine miles through forest paths, since roads had not yet been opened in many parts of the county. A church building went up in West Gore in 1856, not long before Mary and James would have begun raising their family in the district.
What made the Disciples distinctive locally wasn't the theology alone but how it played out in practice: across the Maritimes, historians of the movement note that the question of a paid, settled clergy caused more friction among congregations than points of doctrine — and West Gore itself later became one of the rare Maritime congregations where the use of musical instruments in worship turned genuinely divisive, after the Tallman family relocated there from Ontario in the early twentieth century. For a family like the Murdocks, worshipping Disciples of Christ in Gore in the 1870s and 80s meant belonging to a congregation still working out, within living memory, what it meant to have broken away from the Baptist church at Rawdon a generation before.
Later Years
In the 1891 census, James, 48, is recorded as a farmer and house joiner, still in Gore, with Mary, 43, and children Selina (19), Franklin (17, by now himself a carpenter), Myron (14), Everett (12), and Mary (10) — the two eldest daughters, Estella and Emily, having by then left the household.
By 1901, James had died. Mary, 53 and widowed, was living in Gore with her unmarried son Franklin, then 27 and farming — a bookend to the household of 1864, when Mary herself had been the young unmarried lodger, seventeen and working away from home. Family records — cross-checked against census entries for her mother's Sanford and Fenton relations rather than confirmed by an actual death registration — suggest Mary died in 1943, in her mid-nineties. That last detail is still worth verifying against the primary record before it's treated as settled.
Her mother outlived her by four decades either way. Sarah Melinda, widowed at not quite thirty-four and remarried within the year, raised a second family in Rawdon and, late in life, followed a path some of her own Sanford siblings had already taken to California — settling finally in San Diego, where she died in 1902 under her second husband's name, Fenton, nearly four thousand miles from the Hants County farms and forests where she, and Mary, had begun.
The Stevens Household and the Railway
The household Mary was working in when she received this letter offers a smaller, second thread. In 1864, William Stevens was an engineer for the Nova Scotia Railway, married with three small children at home in Windsor; by the 1871 census the household employed an 18-year-old servant, Fanny Lake, Mary's likely successor in the role.
Windsor owed its importance in Stevens's working life to the railway itself. The Nova Scotia Railway's Windsor Branch, connecting Halifax to Windsor, opened to great fanfare on 3 June 1858 — church bells at dawn, a 109-gun salute, a sham battle on the Common, and a grand ball that evening. By 1864, when this letter reached Mary, the line had been carrying passengers and freight between Windsor and Halifax for six years, and men like Stevens kept it running: maintaining track, rolling stock, and the single-line signalling that let opposing trains pass each other only at sidings such as Mount Uniacke.
It was a good household for a domestic servant to land in: steady railway wages, a settled family, and a home in a town the railway had made a genuine destination, with return trips to Halifax possible within a single day. Mary's few years there, sandwiched between her father's shoemaking trade in Newport and the farming and carpentry life she'd build with James Murdock in Gore, sit at the edge of a much larger story — the arrival of the railway that reshaped how Windsor's residents, servants and engineers alike, moved through the province.
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