Miss Mary Ward, Beech Hill, Nova Scotia

A cover to a daughter of Beech Hill's founding family

This small cover is addressed simply to “Miss Mary Ward, Beech Hill, Nova Scotia,” franked with Nova Scotia's 2¢ dull violet Queen Victoria stamp (Scott # 9). There is no circular datestamp, no backstamp, and no manuscript date — only the stamp itself, the address, and an embossed floral wafer seal on the reverse. Working out who “Miss Mary Ward” was, and when this letter might have reached her, turned into a fuller piece of research than the cover's plain appearance would suggest.

The Stamp and the Rate

Nova Scotia's 2¢ dull violet was issued in May 1863 specifically to cover a new local, or intra-county, letter rate — the first time the colony's decimal stamp series (introduced in October 1860) included a denomination for that purpose. Because Nova Scotia continued issuing its own stamps until it entered Confederation on 1 July 1867, after which Canadian stamps took over, this cover can be dated no earlier than May 1863 and no later than June 1867. Absent a datestamp, that four-year window is as far as the stamp alone can take us.

The rate itself is a clue to the cover's journey: the 2¢ local rate applied to letters mailed and delivered within the same county, which fits a letter posted somewhere else in Kings County and addressed on to Beech Hill, a small settlement a couple of miles south of Kentville.

The Ward Family and the Founding of Beech Hill

Beech Hill was given its name by the family that settled it. William Ward, a young farmer baptized in 1749 at Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, married Elizabeth Flintoff of Helmsley, Yorkshire, at Bilsdale in February 1774. Two weeks later the couple sailed from Hull aboard the Two Friends, arriving at Halifax on 9 May 1774 with their eighteen-month-old son, Moses. (Elizabeth's maiden name has sometimes been given as “Grant” in older family histories; the more recent, extensively researched genealogy Beech Hill Roots attributes this to an undocumented error and identifies her as a Flintoff, daughter of Mark Flintoff and Hannah Helm of Helmsley — a correction this post follows.)

William and Elizabeth first settled near Windsor, Hants County, close to Elizabeth's sister Sarah and brother-in-law John Smith, who had emigrated a year earlier. They soon moved south, clearing land about two miles below Kentville in what became known as Beech Hill — at the time, the southernmost clearing in the county. The name survives today in Beech Hill Road, which still runs alongside a Ward Avenue in what is now North Alton, just south of Kentville.

From the Founders to Mary Ward

The line from the 1774 settlers to the cover's addressee runs through four generations:

William Ward and Elizabeth Flintoff had, among other children, a son William Benjamin Ward Sr. (1790–1864), born at Beech Hill itself.

William Benjamin's son Joseph Leonard Ward (b. 1812) farmed at Beech Hill and later Kentville with his wife, Caroline Elizabeth Calkin. (Sources differ on the year of Joseph's death — 1903 in one record, 1905 with burial at Berwick in another — and this hasn't been resolved.)

Joseph and Caroline's daughter Mary Elizabeth Ward was born at Horton, Kings County, in September 1842 (one source gives 1843). She is very likely this cover's addressee: she remained unmarried throughout the stamp's entire 1863–1867 period of use, which fits “Miss Mary Ward” exactly.

Locating the Ward Household

The 1871 census for Kentville (Division 2) helps place the family, and also very nearly misled this identification. Joseph Leonard and Caroline Ward's household is enumerated there alongside a cluster of five or six other Ward households — Joseph B., Ingersoll, John, George, and Leander Ward among them — a run of neighbouring entries that lines up well with the Ward Avenue/Beech Hill Road cluster on a modern map, and suggests the family still held a concentration of land in the area a century after settling it.

A daughter in Joseph and Caroline's 1871 household, aged 25, was initially read as “Mary.” Comparing ages against the family's birth records showed this didn't fit Mary Elizabeth, who would have been 29 that year — but it matched her younger sister Marcia Alice Ward (b. 1846) almost exactly. On a second look, the census entry is more plausibly read as “Mercy,” not “Mary” — a reminder of how easily two names can be confused in period handwriting, and how much a birth year can do to sort out a wrong turn.

Mary Elizabeth's own absence from the 1871 and 1881 Ward households, once her age is accounted for, points the same direction as the record that ultimately confirmed her: marriage.

Marriage and Later Life

Nova Scotia's marriage index records the union of “May Elizabeth Ward” to a Spicer groom at Kentville in 1869 — almost certainly Mary Elizabeth Ward, with “May” a transcriber's reading of the handwritten “Mary.” The index gives the groom's name as “Thomas Leonard Spicer,” but family-tree and Find A Grave records consistently name him Thomas Edward Spicer (1843–1921) of Welsford — the “Leonard” in the marriage index looks like an indexing slip, quite possibly borrowed from Mary's father's own middle name.

Mary and Thomas settled at Welsford, Kings County, where they raised nine children between 1870 and 1886. Mary Elizabeth (Ward) Spicer died on 4 October 1888 and was buried in the Grafton Methodist Cemetery — a burial confirmed independently by Find A Grave, which records her maiden name as Ward and lists Thomas Edward Spicer as her spouse, corroborating the family-tree account. Thomas remarried in 1891 and lived on until 1921, also buried at Grafton.

A Note on Sources

This identification rests on a convergence of sources — the 1871 census, several Ancestry-hosted family trees, Nova Scotia's marriage index, Find A Grave, and a scanned page from the published genealogy Beech Hill Roots — rather than any single document. Where those sources disagreed on a detail (Mary's birth year, Joseph Leonard's death year, the groom's middle name), this post has noted the discrepancy rather than silently choosing one version. The cover itself remains undated beyond what the stamp allows: sometime between May 1863 and Mary's marriage in 1869, and most likely within the stamp's 1863–1867 period of use, someone in Kings County addressed a letter to “Miss Mary Ward, Beech Hill” — a young, unmarried, fourth-generation daughter of the family that gave the place its name.