Ross Hammond, Dry Goods Merchant and Postmaster
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Updated: 3 hours ago
Ross Hammond was a single, 26-year-old dry goods merchant on Locke's Island when he received this letter from one of Halifax's leading wholesale importers. Hutchinson's Nova Scotia Directory for 1864-65 confirms it directly: under "Little Harbour (See Lewis Head), Lock's Island," the listing reads simply - "-Hammond Ross, dry goods" - placing him in business at precisely the time this letter was mailed, among a small commercial community that also included shipping merchants, blacksmiths, sailmakers, and a combined dry goods grocer/postmaster (Xerxes Z. Chipman) who, interestingly, held the same postmaster role Hammond himself would later take up.
Duffus & Co.
Duffus & Co. was a genuine, well-established name in the city's dry goods trade - listed in period business directories among Halifax's leading importing houses, alongside firms like Doull & Miller and Anderson, Billing & Co. A letter from Duffus & Co. to a small-town merchant like Hammond was ordinary business correspondence of exactly the kind that kept outport Nova Scotia stocked: Halifax wholesalers supplying goods on credit or by order to shopkeepers along the coast, who in turn sold to the fishing and farming communities around them.
Ragged Islands / Locke's Island
The cover shows two names for the same place, and that's not an inconsistency - it's how the community was known at the time. The settlement, founded in 1762 by Massachusetts Planter families led by Jonathan Locke and Josiah Churchill, sat on Allendale Bay and was called both "Ragged Islands" (the informal, geographic name for the area) and "Locke's Island" (its formal township name) right up until incorporation as the Town of Lockeport in 1907. Hammond's correspondent in Halifax addressed the envelope by the everyday name; the local post office backstamped it with the official one. Locke's Island had already produced at least one notable son by this date - John Locke, born there in 1825, sat in the Canadian Senate from 1867 until his death in 1873.
Ross Hammond
The cover shows two names for the same place, and that's not an inconsistency — it's how the community was known at the time. The settlement, founded in 1762 by Massachusetts Planter families led by Jonathan Locke and Josiah Churchill, sat on Allendale Bay and was called both "Ragged Islands" (the informal, geographic name for the area) and "Locke's Island" (its formal township name) right up until incorporation as the Town of Lockeport in 1907. Hammond's correspondent in Halifax addressed the envelope by the everyday name; the local post office backstamped it with the official one. Locke's Island had already produced at least one notable son by this date — John Locke, born there in 1825, sat in the Canadian Senate from 1867 until his death in 1873.
Ross Hammond
Ross Hammond was born November 1, 1838, on Locke's Island, son of Alexander Hammond (1820–1871) and Priscilla Perry Locke (1810–1895), who married February 2, 1837. A Locke family descent chart, compiled from primary and secondary genealogical sources, traces the full line: Priscilla was the daughter of John Locke (1782–1869) and Mary Harlowe (1780–1855), who married in 1804; John was in turn the son of Jonathan Locke (1758–1852) and Elizabeth Rider; and that Jonathan was the son of Dr. Jonathan Locke (b. circa 1731) and Abigail Perry — almost certainly the same Jonathan Locke who led the 1762 Planter settlement of the island that still bears his family's name. That makes Ross Hammond a great-great-grandson of the settlement's founding patriarch.
The same chart resolves an earlier loose thread: Senator John Locke, the Canadian senator born on Locke's Island in 1825, turns out to be part of this same extended family rather than a separate coincidence of name — he married Elizabeth Churchill, herself a Locke descendant through a different branch (the Abigail Locke–Enos Churchill line). He and Ross Hammond were part of the same wide Locke kinship network, though not in direct ancestor-descendant line with each other — more like distant cousins by marriage and blood both.
The chart also documents a sister not previously confirmed: Annie Hammond, who married Joseph Freeman Bill on September 27, 1865 — matching the "Ann Hammond (1844–1937)" recorded elsewhere, now with a married name and date. Ross had at least three other younger siblings: John Alexander (1842–1899), and Bradford (b. 1847). Ross later gave his own daughter "Locke" as a middle name, continuing the family's practice of keeping the name alive across generations — as, notably, did his own great-grandfather Jonathan, whose youngest son of that same name (b. 1821) appears in the earlier Bible record.
He married Rachel Shey (1836–1925) on October 27, 1868, in Falmouth, Hants County — some distance from home — three years after this letter arrived. They had three children: Gertrude Stella (1870–1948), Emeline Locke (1873–1890), and Johnathan Ross (1876–1906). Emeline died young, at just 17, in November 1890. The 1871 and 1881 censuses find the family settled in Lockeport/Ragged Island, Hammond's occupation recorded as merchant, his religion as Baptist. Later in life he became a public figure in his own right, serving as Postmaster of Lockeport, Shelburne County, from 1890 to 1893. He died June 3, 1893, and is buried at Osborne Harbour.
At 26, unmarried, and already doing business directly with a major Halifax importing house, Hammond was clearly an established figure in the Locke's Island trade well before he took up the postmastership that would put him, quite literally, in charge of the mail in the town where letters like this one had once arrived for him.
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