Clifton Royal: The Wetmores and Village Life in the Nineteenth-Century New Brunswick

Richard Wilbur is author of The Rise of French New Brunswick and H.H.
Stevens, 1878–1973, and co-author of Silver Harvest: The Fundy
Weirmen’s Story. His latest book is Horse-Drawn Carriages and Sleighs:
Elegant Vehicles from New England and New Bruns

I’ve recently spent several enjoyable hours visiting Clifton Royal on
the Kingston Peninsula outside Saint John, courtesy of this delightful
and informative collection of diaries, Agricultural Society minutes, and
informative endnotes.

Reading through the daily diaries of David Wetmore, his wife Araminta,
David’s younger brother Howard, and his wife’s all too brief account
for 1889, I became acutely aware of what life was like in an
economically and socially viable village during the latter part of the
1880s. It wasn’t a life of grinding toil, but one balanced by a myriad
variety of daily chores, attending church and lodge meetings and serving
as school board members plus frequent visits from relatives and friends,
many of whom arrived on one of the many sternwheeler riverboats that
carried passengers and farm produce down to the markets in the port city
of Saint John.

Judith Baxter’s love and respect for this once-thriving but still
extant rural community show in her zeal to collect and annotate the
diaries as well as in her selection of photographs mostly from the New
Brunswick Public Archives.

Any modern urbanite who reads this book will gain considerable useful
knowledge about the best ways to get prime crops of strawberries,
raspberries, potatoes, and rhubarb. For those who still delight in the
challenges and rewards from wood heat, the diarists’ accounts of
gathering and preparing wood for winter use will relate to their
efforts. Clifton Royal is a keeper.