Silas L. Morse, Barrister of Bridgetown

Nova Scotia # 10 on June 5 1862 cover from Windsor, Nova Scotia to Bridgetown, Nova Scotia. Addressed to Silas Morse, Esq., Bridgetown, Annapolis, N.S. Backstamp Windsor, N.S. JU 5, 1862. Red wax seal.

Nova Scotia # 10 on a 28 Feb1868 cover from Halifax to Bridgetown, Nova Scotia. Addressed to S. L. Morse, Esq, Queens Counsel, Bridgetown. Backstamp, Bridgetown, 2 March 1868. A post-Confederation example of Nova Scotia franking.

Silas Livingstone Morse, an attorney in Bridgetown, Annapolis County, was sixty-four years old when he received this 1868 letter from an unknown sender in Halifax. He was born 15 December 1803 in Bridgetown and died at 6 A.M. on 17 January 1871 (aged 67) in Bridgetown of “congestion of the lungs”. His death certificate notes “for some 5 years afflicted with attacks of partial paralysis epilepsy, etc.”

Belcher’s Farmer’s Almanac for 1836, Roll of Barristers and Attorneys in Nova Scotia, lists Silas L. Morse, admitted attorney 3 May 1831, admitted barrister 1 May 1832, Bridgetown.

Silas Morse does not appear in the 1838 census as the head of a family in Bridgetown. In commenting on this Elizabeth Ruggles Coward says, “It will be noticed that no lawyers are listed in this census of 1838, yet Silas Morse had rented an office in the town as early as 1831, and was certainly here in 1838, though possibly not a householder at the time. He was a bachelor and lived in several houses before he died. He brought up his nephew, Albert Morse, who also became a lawyer.”

Writing about the Nova Scotia Barrister’s Society as an “old boy’s club” with the criteria for admission related to “gentlemanly status, not to professional credentials or ‘competence’.” Philip Girard says, “Only one membership list has survived from this period and it shows a mere 29 members in 1860, out of some 155 lawyers resident in the province. All but one, Silas L. Morse of Bridgetown, resided in Halifax and most were older men, with only a half-dozen members under 40.”

The 1861 census of Annapolis County, Polling District 4, has Silas Morse as the head of a household of 5: 2 males, 3 females.

Hutchinson’s Nova Scotia Directory, 1864-5, has S.L. Morse, attorney in Bridgetown, Annapolis County

Silas L. Mor.se, Barrister, held the office of Custom Rotulorum (President of the Bench of Magistrates) for Annapolis County from October, 1865, to October, 1867.

Belcher’s Almanac for 1869, List of Barristers and Attornies [sic.] Resident in Nova Scotia, has Silas L. Morse, Q.C., with the same professional dates as noted in 1836, in Bridgetown.

McAlpine’s Nova Scotia Directory, 1868-9, lists MORSE SILAS L., barrister and Q.C. in Bridgetown.

McAlpine’s Maritime Province Directory 1870-1, lists Morse, Silas L. Q.C. barrister in Bridgetown.

Though Silas never married, he raised his brother’s son, Alfred Osborne Morse who became a lawyer and died in Hingham, Massachusetts.

Thomas Willett Chesley, Q.C., an Annapolis County farmer and subsequent prominent lawyer and politician, was admitted to the bar in 1857 at the age of 43 after studying in the offices of Silas L. Morse, Esq.

Silas’s father, Deacon Silas Morse was born August 26, 1767, in Annapolis, the son of Abner and Anna Morse of Annapolis. His mother, Elizabeth (Osborn) Chipman, widow of John H. Chipman, was Deacon Silas’ second wife. They married 14 January 1803. They had seven children. Silas Livingstone was their eldest. Deacon Silas Morse died 30 Apr 1849 in Bridgetown, and is buried in the Morse Cemetery, West Paradise, Annapolis County.

Silas’s grandparents, Abner and Anna (Church) Morse were pre-Revolutionary War New England planters in Annapolis, Nova Scotia from Sherborn, Middlesex County, Massachusetts. Abner was born September 25, 1731, the son of Obadiah and Mercy (Walker) Morse of Sherborn, Middlesex County, Massachusetts. On February 19, 1756, he married Anna Church in Sherborn. She was born 20 Nov 1737, the daughter of Jonathan Church and Thankful Bullard of Watertown, Middlesex. Their first two children were born in Massachusetts. They had twelve children in all. Deacon Silas was their sixth child.

The Morse family moved from Sudbury, Massachusetts, to Annapolis Royal on the Ship Charming Molly, arriving on June 25 1760, accompanied by Abner's brother, Samuel Morse, his family, and other settlers. Abner died Dec. 27, 1803, and is buried in the Morse Cemetery West Paradise, Annapolis County.

Bridgetown, Nova Scotia

Located on the Annapolis River at the head of the tide, the Bridgetown area had Mi'kmaq settlements followed by Acadian settlers from Port-Royal and then, after the Expulsion, Planter and Loyalist settlements.

From the days of the Acadians until 1803, a ferry connected the site of Bridgetown village with the hamlets on the south side of the river and was called Hick's Ferry. Peter Pineo, jr., a native of Lebanon, Connecticut and one of the early emigrants to Cornwallis, is said to have built the first post-Expulsion house on the site of the present town. In 1782 Rev. Jacob Railey speaks of Mr. Pineo's house as being eighteen miles from Annapolis. The road between the two places was then more circuitous, crossing the streams and creeks where they were narrow, and at the head of the tide. Mr. Pineo was a pioneer shipbuilder and exporter, of considerable influence, and "distinguished for agreeable hospitalities". Embarking for the West Indies in one of his vessels, neither he nor the vessel was ever heard from again. His house, known as the "mud house" from the fact that its materials of stones and wood were cemented together by clay and mud, was long kept as an inn, and finally as a schoolhouse. Probably Captain Crosskill built the next house. Afterwards, Joseph Gidney, a Loyalist of White Plains, New York, built a house and a few other houses were probably built prior to 1803, when steps were taken to build a bridge to supersede the ferry, the expense being partly provided by a grant from the Legislature, and partly by private subscriptions, and in November, 1805, the Grand Jury pronounced the contract for the construction of the bridge "faithfully executed," and the money voted by the Legislature and raised by private subscription toward building said bridge, "faithfully laid out" by the Commissioners, Robert Fitzrandolph and John Ruggles. This, of course, gave an immediate impulse to the growth of the settlement.

The covered bridge was replaced by an iron draw bridge in 1907

Bridgetown is one of few towns in Nova Scotia to have developed from a formal town plan, or plat. Captain John Crosskill, who owned or controlled the central part of the community, what is now downtown, divided the bulk of the lands into 90 by 90 lots in 1821. His foresight in laying out his land in town lots resulted in rapid growth of the town. Being at the head of the river navigation, it immediately developed an export trade and became a shipping port for small vessels of the products of all the valley eastward of it and the mountains north and south. In the year 1822 upwards of sixty vessels loaded at the bridge, and in 1823 one hundred cargoes were shipped from it. During the succeeding year two churches were built, Baptist and Church of England, and later the first Methodist church was erected. The place still bore the name Hick's Ferry, until on January 25, 1824, the leading residents, elated with the prosperity and importance of the town growing up around them, met at a public dinner to discuss the question of a more suitable name, and the name Bridgetown was adopted. There are two versions of the rationale for the name. The more romantic has it that the community was named after Bridgetown, Barbados, because Captain Crosskill had once been stationed there, and had apparently much enjoyed it. The other simply attributes the name to the presence of a bridge over the Annapolis River. This version is given some credence because Joseph Howe, in his Rambles, refers to the area as "The Bridge". By the end of the year the village contained fifty or sixty houses. From the first, manufacturing, such as carriage building, tanneries, etc., flourished in the town, and in the later 1850s and early 1860s many important industrial establishments sprang up in it with a furniture factory, foundry, etc. In 1827 the law respecting Commissioners of Streets was extended to Bridgetown; and in the same year Thomas James and others petitioned the Legislature for aid to erect a suitable schoolhouse. A new school was soon opened, adapted to the growing necessities of the town. But when the new school law came into operation in 1864, the opposition to the introduction of compulsory assessment for the erection and support of schools was very strong in Bridgetown. A Halifax party newspaper, on December 6th, 1864, said: "On Saturday last an attempt was made, the third or fourth, we hear (made of course under Secretary Rand's Educational Notice No. 3) to carry an assessment at Bridgetown to be legalized by and by. Ladies and gentlemen attended, and every taxpayer of both sexes that could be induced to attend was in force to vote, but the government officers were again defeated."

In 1856, the Western News, the first newspaper ever published in Annapolis County was established at Bridgetown. In 1858 the Examiner was founded, and later the Free Press, under the editorial management of Angus M. Gidney, "an able, witty and effective political controversialist, afterwards Sergeant-at-arms to the House of Assembly. He was a genial and popular citizen."

The Windsor and Annapolis Railway (W&A) constructed its mainline between Windsor and Annapolis Royal through the area in 1868, crossing over the Annapolis River on a bridge between the north and south banks in the community. The original W&A crossing was a wooden covered bridge that was replaced in 1881 by the present iron railway bridge.

Bridgetown with the Grand Central Hotel on the left.