Thomas H. Carré, Halifax Commission Merchant

One Nova Scotia # 8 (1¢ black) and two # 9s (2¢ each), five cents in all — the standard intra-provincial single letter rate — franked a cover posted March 23, 1863, addressed to “Thos. H. Carre Esq., R. Gorham & Co., Halifax.” The stamps are tied by a barred oval cancellation, and the reverse carries two backstamps: an illegible originating office reading “MA 23, 1863” and Halifax's own “MR 24, 1863.” The month discrepancy — May against March — is almost certainly a postmaster's datestamp error rather than a real two-month gap; read as a same-day-to-next-day domestic delivery, the cover moved through the ordinary channels of Nova Scotia's internal mail with no drama at all.

R. Gorham & Co.

The firm addressed on the cover was R. Gorham & Co., fish and commission merchants at 145 Lower Water Street, Head of Brown's Wharf — dealers, per their own advertisements, in “Flour, Meal, Provisions, and Fishing Supplies,” taking consignments of dry and pickled fish,

oils, and country produce “sold free of Commission when sent in exchange for goods.” The “R.” was Richard Tonge Gorham, born about 1799–1800 in Liverpool, Queens County, Nova Scotia, the son of Isaac Gorham (1769–1810), who died at Gabarus, Cape Breton, when Richard was about eleven, and Elizabeth “Betsy” Tonge. Isaac's own father, and Richard's great-grandfather, was Jabez Gorham (1725–1804), a Connecticut-born New England Planter who had brought his family from Plymouth, Massachusetts, to resettle Liverpool around 1760, part of the wave of transplanted New Englanders who repopulated Nova Scotia's South Shore after the Acadian expulsion. Isaac's younger brother, and so Richard's uncle, was Capt. John Gorham, who turns up in Simeon Perkins's own diary — one of Nova Scotia's genuinely major eighteenth-century primary sources — as master of the schooners Ruby and Grey Hound, running the West Indies trade between Liverpool and Martinique, St. Vincent, and Barbados in 1795 and 1796. Richard himself made his career inland from the water, in Halifax's commission trade.

Richard married twice and raised, across both marriages, thirteen children. His first wife, Margaret Nichol Johnstone, bore him at least six — Edward, John William (who died before his second birthday), James, Sarah Elizabeth, Jane, and an infant daughter, also named Margaret — before dying herself on April 25, 1839. That infant, Margaret Nicol Gorham, followed her mother into the grave only seven weeks later, on June 13, 1839: a double loss inside two months, with Jane, not yet two years old, among the surviving children left behind. Richard remarried the following year, in April 1840, to Margaret Helen Gentles, and had six more children with her — including two, Charles Freeman Gorham and John William Gorham (the name reused for a second son after the first John William's early death), who turn up in the 1868–69 Halifax directory working directly in their father's firm as clerk and bookkeeper, sharing his household at 23 Maynard Street. Jane, in other words, grew up the daughter of a first marriage inside a large, twice-built family, with two much younger half-brothers who would go on to carry the business forward after both she and their father were gone.

Thomas H. Carré

Thomas H. Carré — the spelling shifts between “Carre,” “Carré,” and the Anglicized “Carrie” across the record, evidently all the same man — was himself a commission merchant, operating from 145 Lower Water Street: the same address as R. Gorham & Co. That overlap turns out to have a straightforward explanation. On October 27, 1862, Thomas H. Carre, bachelor, and Jane Gorham, spinster, both of Halifax, took out a marriage bond to wed without the publication of banns, before the Reverend Peter McGregor of Halifax's Presbyterian congregation. Jane was Richard Gorham's daughter — which made Thomas Carré's business tie to the Gorham firm, quite plausibly, a tie of marriage as much as of trade.

It was a short marriage. Jane Gorham Carré died at Halifax on March 13, 1864 — “in the 27th year of her age” — barely seventeen months after the bond was taken out, and about a year after this cover was posted to her husband. Her father followed her fifteen months later, on June 23, 1865, and was buried at Camp Hill Cemetery. Between the two deaths, Thomas Carré's world narrowed visibly: an 1864–65 directory shows him living apart from his business, on Inglis Street near Pleasant — very possibly the home he and Jane had shared — while a later listing has him moved to live over his own commission house at 145 Lower Water itself, the kind of quiet domestic contraction that often follows a husband becoming, suddenly, a widower with no household left to keep. He also appears, undated, as the sole owner — all 64 shares — of the schooner Rosebud, a small Halifax-registered coasting vessel built in 1859 and worked by a crew of two. By the 1868–69 McAlpine's directory, though, he's gone: the alphabetical run passes directly from “Carrey John” to “Carroll Daniel” with no Carrie entry between them, a genuine absence rather than an easy listing to miss. That gap sits comfortably with a June 1868 death — directory canvassing typically closed out well before publication — and reads as one more piece of evidence, alongside the Arichat burial record, that Thomas Carré's own life ended not long after his wife's and father-in-law's did.

A Guernsey Connection?

One further thread is worth setting down, even unresolved. A Find a Grave record shows a Thomas Henry Carre, born 1838, dying June 5, 1868 — not yet thirty — and buried at St. John's Anglican Church Cemetery in Arichat, Richmond County — a considerable distance from Halifax, and the same cemetery associated with a very different family in an earlier post in this series. If this is our man, he died young even by the standard of this story's own hard luck: a bride dead at twenty-six, a father-in-law dead at sixty-five, and Thomas himself gone within a very few years of either, cutting short whatever came after the widower years traced here through the Halifax directories. A prior post of mine on Henry Carrie, a Guernsey-born merchant and Justice of the Peace at nearby River Bourgeois in the same county, had already flagged this same record as a possible, unconfirmed relative. Everything gathered here about the Halifax Thomas H. Carré makes that connection more plausible without quite proving it: the Anglicized “Carrie” spelling used in the Halifax directories matches the spelling used for Henry Carrie specifically, and a Guernsey merchant family sending a son off to build a career in the provincial capital, only to be brought home to Richmond County ground after an untimely death, would fit a well-documented Channel Islands pattern in Nova Scotia's fishing and trading communities. A pair of earlier records — a Thomas Carre recorded at Southside Lingan, Cape Breton, in 1838, and a Thomas Carrie in the 1851 Halifax census — may or may not belong to this same family; neither carries enough detail on its own to say. Short of a document that names the relationship outright, this stays a strong hypothesis rather than a settled fact.

Five cents' postage, a one-day domestic run, and a routine business letter to a young Halifax commission merchant: on its face, about as ordinary as these covers get. Behind it sits a marriage barely a year and a half old, a bride not yet twenty-seven, and a family — the Gorhams of Liverpool, three generations removed from a sea captain who ran rum up from Barbados — that lost both a daughter and its patriarch within fifteen months of each other. And if the Arichat record is indeed his, Thomas Carré followed them soon enough himself, dead by his late twenties, not long after this cover reached him at the very outset of a marriage that had almost no time left to run. Whether he carried a Guernsey name into that story, or simply built one of his own on Lower Water Street, the cover endures as the one plain fact tying all of it together.