Background
FROM OROMOCTO TO NORTH LAKE: RURAL DECLINE AND MIGRATION IN NINETEENTH CENTURY NEW BRUNSWICK
by
Rex Grady
In 1869 a group of related families left the Oromocto watershed in Sunbury County, New Brunswick and resettled in North Lake, York County, on the Maine border. The migration can be understood as an instance of chain migration, originating in a process of progressive and relative resource diminution very similar to that process outlined by the New England historian Philip Greven.
The Oromocto was a timber producing region, thus, as the river slowly relinquished its timber, and the population grew, the viability of life for many of the river's settlers became greatly diminished. From 1830 to 1870, the slow process of timber extraction unfolded, giving rise to a long-term recession throughout the watershed. For the families of the people who eventually migrated to North Lake, this recession was particularly troubling as many of them, even before the commencement of the aforementioned period, had become dependent almost exclusively on the timber industry to satisfy their basic material needs. In the 1840s and 1850s opportunities for employment in the woods would wane. Subsequently, members of the migrant families would move into the hinterland, partly in pursuit of fast receding stands of marketable timber, partly in an effort to acquire possession of real estate as a kind of hedge against any future economic difficulties. By the 1860s, opportunities either to cut timber or to own productive land were largely gone.
Thus, by 1869, with no other more attractive alternatives before them, the migrant families became just that-- migrant families. Yet while the choice to depart en masse, and to settle together in North Lake, on the part of these settlers punctuates a long-term process of relative rural decline in nineteenth century New Brunswick, it also represents an instance of chain migration. Indeed, the migrants went to North Lake not simply because the opportunities there for Settlement and employment were relatively good, but because a former Oromoctoan by the name of Hugh McMinn had already chosen to make his home there.
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