Category Archives: PEI History

I swear I know how to read, and I have bookmarks to prove it

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Peter’s wonderful post about Charlottetown’s venerable Bookmark (his photos of tiny details around the shop and their aerie office are delightful) made me dash pre-morning-coffee to rifle through my small bookmark collection to confirm his observation that there has never been a “the” before the bookstore’s name. Me too, Peter, me too.

I guess I had my final visit to the Queen Street location this past Wednesday, when I dashed in to pick up a book order while a friend waited in my illegally-parked car. I didn’t know to give a final nod to the place where I’ve spent many happy hours, so Peter’s post allowed me one last wistful glimpse. Looking forward to the new digs!

A series of yellow and blue bookmarks from a Charlottetown, PEI, store called Bookmark. The oldest one would likely be from the early 1980s and the most recent from a couple of years ago.
The bookmarks of Bookmark, from the early 1980s to almost today.

Something in the wind

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Late summer 1925 was filled with federal election rumours, and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King eventually did call a general election for October 29 of that year. King had some housekeeping to do before the election, and one of his tasks was filling half of PEI’s seats in the Senate, which meant appointing two new senators to replace John Yeo and Patrick Murphy, who had both died during the previous year.

The August 31, 1925 Charlottetown Guardian editorial page was full of Senate news and opinion:

“Local Liberals and prospective senators are putting on an expectant and worried look these days. Evidently there is something in the wind.” Charlottetown Guardian August 31, 1925 p4.

Then, breaking front page news from the September 3, 1925 Guardian:

Senators Who May Or May Not Be

Rumors were rife in the city yesterday regarding appointments to the vacant senatorships, to the effect that the choice had fallen upon Mr. J. J. Hughes, M. P., and Mr. Creelman McArthur, Summerside. No confirmation of this rumor was available last night but no doubt official announcement will be forthcoming very shortly. The Liberal decks are being cleared for action and no doubt all possible appointments will be made before the Liberal conventions are held as some possibilities for a senatorship may be willing to accept nomination as second choice, if they should fail in bagging the bigger plum. Mr. Nelson Rattenbury who has been a senatorial possibility till the last minute has been eliminated from the list by a consolation prize of a seat on the C. N. R. Board of Directors. What consolation will be handed out to the remaining aspirants has not yet been divulged, but anything is possible now that appointments will be handed out promiscuously in view of the pending election. In the meantime until more definite information is to hand, Messrs J. J. Hughes and Creelman McArthur will enjoy the felicity of being senators pro tem but subject to revision.

I can confirm that the rumours about Hughes and M(a)cArthur were true, and Creel resigned his seat in the PEI Legislature on September 5. Now to fire up the time machine and go back to place a few bets!

The original (non-operational) outhouse for Senator MacArthur’s Cedar Lodge built in 1933 and restored by me in 2013. We lovingly refer to it as The Senate.

Vic Runtz Collection #1

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Here are some 75-year-old Vic Runtz cartoons from the Charlottetown Guardian I’ve enjoyed over the past few months. Plus ça change…

Newfoundland, a Canadian province for only one year, announced the creation of a provincial museum while PEI could never seem to get beyond the talking stage (and still can’t to this day). July 14, 1950, page 4
July 8, 1950, page 4.
Scrappy little Summerside’s new federal government building (now the site of the Summerside Rotary Library) was under construction while Charlottetown still waiting. April 20, 1950.

Roma Theresa Morgan

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This tragic item on the front page of the May 19, 1925 Charlottetown Guardian left me wanting to know more about Roma Theresa Morgan. I’ve pieced together a bit of a history from a couple of census records and a baptism record for Theresa or Teresa, born May 10, 1894 probably near Fort Augustus, PEI, where she was baptized on May 27, 1894 at St. Patrick’s church, to John Morgan (born in Ireland around 1839) and Mary (Monaghan) Morgan (born Ireland August 10, 1854).

By the 1911 Census, John was dead and Mary and Theresa were living with a border at 58 Queen Street, Charlottetown. By 1931, Mary was living with her oldest child, Joseph, who was single and a farmer in Watervale, PEI.

Dear Theresa would have just turned 29 around the time of her death in faraway Brooklyn. How did a PEI girl get to New York 100 years ago and become a magazine cover model? Did Theresa send money back to her family, along with copies of the magazine covers? What must they have thought of her new life? 

Charlottetown Girl Takes Poison by Mistake

(Special to the Guardian) NEW YORK, May 18 - Three years ago pretty Roma Theresa Morgan, whose mother and sister live at 58 Queen Street, Charlottetown, P. E. I., came to New York, to win fame and fortune. Today she is on her way back home in a casket, the victim of poison taken by accident.

Roma posed for several of the greatest magazine cover artists in America but a few months ago was obliged to cease working because of poor health. The other evening her landlady Mrs. Elsie Ilse, who maintained a furnished rooming house over in Brooklyn found the girl writhing on the floor of her room. She was rushed to a hospital but all efforts to save her life were in vain. The police say the girl mistook a bottle of poison for rheumatism medicine.

No notes were found which would indicate suicide and other roomers in the house knew her as a cheerful friendly person.

Grace Beattie

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If you were born in the second Prince County Hospital (1951-2004) in Summerside, PEI, as I was in October 1966, you were born on Beattie Avenue, named in honour of Summerside nurse Grace Beattie. Her death announcement in the May 12, 1950 Charlottetown Guardian outlines a career and devotion to the nursing profession that would be difficult to imagine being equalled by many other people.

She left the world in the hospital she helped create, just before the old building became surplus with the opening of the new facility, Grace nor the old PCH wanting to exist without the other.

Death of Miss Grace Beattie Widely Mourned
Many old friends in this Province and abroad will regret to learn of the death in the Prince County Hospital on Wednesday night of Miss Grace Beattie at the age of 91 years. She was the first superintendent of the Prince County Hospital and during the past five and a half years she resided there, in the institution she had helped so greatly to organize.

The deceased was a daughter of the late Thomas and Margaret Howatt Beattie of Summerside and received her early education here. Taking up the nursing profession as her life’s work, she graduated from MacLean Hospital at Waverley, Mass., in 1889 and from the General Hospital in Boston in 1893. During that year she was appointed assistant superintendent of Quincy, Mass. Hospital and two years later she organized the Brockton Mass. Hospital and School of Nursing. Here she remained until 1912 when due to illness she resigned and returned to her home town where during her rest period she organized the Prince County Hospital School for Nurses, which had been officially opened about a month previous by the Duke of Connaught during his visit to the Province as Governor General of Canada.

She returned to the United States in 1912 and during the next 17 years her outstanding ability as an organizer was recognized by the leading hospital authorities throughout New England. She was, during that time, entrusted with the organizing and superintending of a number of hospitals and schools of nursing among which was the hospital at North Adams, Mass., and during the First World War she reorganized the lthaca, New York, Hospital where she remained until 1922. She was then appointed superintendent of Elliot Hospital, Manchester, N. H., and while there suffered the misfortune of a broken hip and for two years after was unable to carry on the work of her chosen profession.

After her recovery from the result of the accident, she assumed the superintendent’s position of the Johnston Memorial Hospital, Stafford Springs, Conn., which was run by graduate nurses.

She retired from hospital work in 1929, and although she had then reached the age of 70 years she went to Boston where she took a special course in religious art.

She returned to Summerside in 1940 where she lived until about five and a half years ago and then entered the Prince County Hospital and remained there until the time of her death on Wednesday night.

She is survived by one sister, Mrs. Maynard Schurman, Summerside.

The funeral will take place on Friday when the remains will be taken from the Compton Funeral Home to the Central Street Church of Christ for service at 2.30 P. M.

My great-grandfather Thomas nearly dies on Malpeque Bay

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This story I found last month was a tale lost to my branch of the Phillips family.

My great-grandfather, Thomas Henry Phillips (1851-1924), was a farmer in Ellerslie, PEI. He and his wife Agnes had nine children, who all lived well into their adulthoods with the exception of my grandfather Alvin (1890-1936), who died of appendicitis. Alvin took over his father’s farm and the other four sons left Ellerslie, one to become a merchant in Summerside and three to the O’Leary area to farm and, it seems in the case of Forrest, to eventually enter provincial politics.

The names of the other characters in this tale of 19th century perilous winter travel are still common names in our area with the exception of Price. I found a Jesse Strang Price (born Bedeque, PEI, 1831 – died Green Forest, Carroll County, Arkansas, 1916), married to Mary Ann, who had a son John born 1864, the eldest of his five children, all of whom were born in Ellerslie between 1864 and 1874

It appears that Price family moved to the US, perhaps to escape the dangerous winter weather, who knows. One genealogy website I found said John Price drowned in the Arkansas River on June 5, 1916, aged 52, and it seems Jesse died later that month on June 28 at age 84, which would be a rather heartbreaking coincidence as they both risked dying together on a frozen Canadian bay so many years earlier.

The columnist, Frank MacArthur, was a prolific contributor to the Guardian in the mid part of the 20th century and later published a book about PEI legends.

Pioneer Days In P. E. I. by F. H. MacArthur

Charlottetown Guardian, April 12, 1950

Tales of ice travel are always thrilling and the adventure which befell a party of Ellerslie and Tyne Valley folk almost one hundred years ago is one of the most exciting. It is still told from Ellerslie to Richmond Bay and no matter how often it is retold, it still grips and holds the listener.

Jesse Price and his son John, William Ford, Thomas Burleigh and Thomas Phillips of Ellerslie, with William Ellis and son, and “Billy the Duke” of Tyne Valley, and a couple of teen-aged youngsters, had loaded their sleds with timber gleaned from the surrounding forests. Their destination was Malpeque. The timber was for the shipyards. Ellerslie folk supplied a good deal of the lumber used at Malpeque, Darnley and Princetown. In return for the lumber the settlers got flour, groceries, fodder, and their spring seed – the old trade and barter system was then in use.

Our story opens on a certain day in the month of March. Their journey, a distance of twenty miles, had to be traversed by ice. The little party set out before daylight with the expectation of being back home early that same night. The party reached Malpeque without mishap, unloaded their lumber and secured a good supply of provisions for themselves and their livestock. This occupied considerable time and when they reached the ice field for their return trip one of the men, Thomas Phillips, father of F. W. Phillips, speaker of the House, had failed to join the others. After waiting on the shore for nearly an hour they decided he must have gone on to Summerside to spend the night at the home of a friend.

Already the sun had sunk to rest behind a great cloud bank, and a strong gale was sweeping across the country. There was every indication of a big storm. Now the farmers pointed to the sky, spoke of the wind, and the dangerous spring-holes that lay along their route of travel. On more than one occasion these spring-holes, often too wide for the horses to jump, had to be bridged with the bottom of their sleds or anything they come by. More than one unlucky traveller had plunged into the cold waters, and more than one valuable horse had perished in this manner during the height of a storm. Before half the distance had been covered the blizzard burst upon them in a maddening rush that promised to scatter them like Autumn leaves. “Better rope the sleds together,” advised Price, “then we can let the horses have a free rein and trust to luck.”

The animals were used to crossing the ice and their owners had the feeling that, left to themselves, they would be able to keep the trail. But they had not reckoned on such a storm, and after bravely facing it for a time, even the faithful horses became hopelessly confused, lost their way and went around in aimless circles. Not a man among them could tell one direction from another. Finally, they decided to camp where they were.

It would be sure folly to risk their lives as well as the lives of the horses on such a night. So all hands got busy. The loads were placed in such a position as to form a circle and chained together to prevent their being blown apart. Now the animals were taken from the sleds and led into the circle.

The wind meanwhile, tried to demolish them root and stem. The snow came down in great white blinding masses that fairly sucked the breath from the men’s lips and bullied the two twelve-year-old children till they cried loudly.

In spite of the barricade the party spent a hectic night of it. In order to keep the children from freezing a considerable quantity of hay was twisted into long thick ropes and put to the torch. The twisting was to keep it from burning too fast.

At last the dawn broke. Over fifteen inches of snow covered the landscape. The wind had not abated and the air was thick with its white madness. Not till noon did they get their bearings. The land which poked its head above a mound of snow they recognized as Low Point.

Towards noon the wind suddenly ceased its wild play, and the little group of adventurers were able to reach their homes in safety, though twenty-four hours late.

Thomas Phillips had not gone to Summerside as his neighbors thought. He was delayed in getting his load which happened to be seed grain, so when he came to the shore and found the others had pushed on he decided to do the same thing. Into the teeth of the storm he ventured but finally he too was obliged to give up. He decided to take refuge on one of the small islands in Richmond Bay. But unlike the others he had no shelter and after tramping around in the deep snow for a couple of hours – it was too cold to remain long in one spot – he hitched up his shivering steed and again pushed forward. Lady Luck was with him and he reached home safe and sound. But when the women-folk of the tiny settlement saw his ghost-like form approaching through the drifts their hearts skipped some beats. And no wonder, for they thought the others had perished.

This story was sent in by Sanford Phillips of O’Leary who informed your correspondent that the last survivor of that ice episode, Mr. Thomas Burleigh, passed away quite recently in his late 90’s.

History passing

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I took my mother to an audiologist appointment at the mall in Summerside yesterday. She’s nearly deaf now in her right ear, with about 10% of her hearing remaining, and has been completely deaf in her left ear for over 80 years. She receives a disability pension from Veterans Affairs because her hearing loss was due to her Second World War service, so she can get an updated hearing aid every few years. The newer digital hearing aids have been life changing for my mother.

After her appointment, we took the opportunity to run a couple of errands, which meant spanning the length of the mall. Though she can walk quite well (with assistance) for short distances, we often use a transfer wheelchair for longer outings.

I’ve been following the coverage of events marking the 80th anniversary of VE Day and have found the images of the couple of dozen Canadian Second World War veterans who travelled to Europe for the commemorations very moving, probably the last trip for many.

Perhaps it was due to being awash in all this poignancy that I found myself pushing my tiny mother and overcome with the urge to call out to the people in the mall, “Look at this woman! She’s 102, she walked to a train station by herself with a little suitcase over 80 years ago to join the Royal Canadian Air Force Women’s Division! She saw a German U-boat surface in the Gulf of St. Lawrence! She lost her hearing during the war! This is history passing in front of you!”

But I didn’t yell, of course. We just kept walking and rolling by the people staring at their phones and browsing in shops, my mother just another elderly person. We stopped to talk to the niece of another veteran of that long ago war, who said her centenarian aunt was in the hospital again, having a rough time. My mother went home and wrote her veteran friend a get well card that I delivered to the hospital today.

I’m told there are fewer than 10 Second World War veterans left on PEI. History is passing.

Vivian Phillips in front of my parent’s first apartment at 37 Russell Street, Summerside, 1945. Though released from her RCAF service in January of that year, she is still wearing her very serviceable military uniform shoes.

Old-Timey Talk

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My mother was watching a news channel yesterday and a piece about the current US president came on. She uses closed captioning because of her profound hearing loss, so thankfully I didn’t have to hear him. I said something like “Oh brother, now what?” and she laughed and declared him a scallywag. He certainly is.

Partly through hearing loss and partly through being raised by people born in rural PEI in the 1800s and early 1900s, my mother uses some interesting pronunciations and phrases, some of which I have also adopted.

When Biden stepped down from the 2024 US presidential election, my mother said it was because he was too “doty”, which means feeble-minded, in your dotage. Not dotty, though kind of the same.

My mother calls the red tomato sauce catsup, because that’s what it used to be, though most people say and spell it ketchup now. And she always pronounces tomato “to-mah-to”.

Drought, as in a prolonged period of dry weather, she pronounces to rhyme with “truth”, so “druth”, which sounds very old country to me.

Something I’ve never heard outside our family came from her uncle Everett Hardy. She always said that he called a windy, rainy storm a pompero, as in “it’s blowing a pompero,” and she would often refer to a storm that way. I could never find any other reference to this word and sort of thought he just made it up.

I was at the Summerside library a few years ago and they had just received a reprint of The Sailor’s Word-Book, which is a list of nautical words. I looked up pompero and didn’t find anything, but flipped around the “p” section and found:

Pampero: A violent squall of wind from the S.W., attended with rain, thunder, and lightning, over the immense plains or pampas of the Rio de la Plata, where it rages like a hurricane.

Bingo! How did her uncle, who never travelled much further than Nova Scotia once or twice, learn a word from South America? He loved to read, especially about sailing and the sea, so perhaps he learned about it in a book, but I rather expect it was something he heard someone else use, a word that travelled on the ships that moved up and down the Atlantic. My mother and I still call a wild storm a pompero, so guess that mispronunciation is our very own word.

To express surprise we may say “Land o’Goshen”, or use “by cracky” for emphasis, by cracky.

My mother has never sworn in all my 40+ years of living with her. She called someone an ass a couple of years ago, and that’s the worst I’ve ever heard. My surprise at hearing that word come out of her mouth, and the intent behind it, made me laugh until I cried. And yes, I can confirm the fellow in question is an ass, and it’s not the scallywag-in-chief to the south but someone who lives close by who will remain nameless…and an ass.

I used to be a bit ashamed of my PEI accent, and used to actively tamp it down when I lived off Island, but now I don’t care and it’s as thick as it probably was when I was a child. I definitely use the inhaled “yuh” a lot, eh?

Up West

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From The Western Guardian section of the Charlottetown Guardian, January 16, 1925

This brief item in the January 16, 1925 Charlottetown Guardian made me smile. I would expect many Summersiders today would suspect they don’t often get a better deal than Charlottetown folks, but at least on the train in 1925 there was a benefit in coming from the western capital!

The region of PEI where I live is commonly referred to as Up West. It’s more Up Northwest, really, from the rest of the island, but as the main highway through our end of PEI, Route 2, has long been referred to as the Western Road because it starts from the western end of Summerside, we are west.

Some people in central PEI can take the “up” part too literally, as if you have to climb a steep mountain to get here. There is a notion – mostly apocryphal, but a little bit true, in my experience – that when you try to organize a meeting between people in my area and folks from Charlottetown, or even sometimes Summerside, you will hear “But it’s soooo far to go to Tyne Valley/O’Leary/Alberton/Tignish!”, as if the distance would be magically shorter for us to go to them.

Maybe someone at the PEI Railway knew of this magic directional difference, perhaps similar to a magnetic hill, and that prompted the cheaper west-to-east fare to the 1925 hockey game. Mistake? Mischief? Delightful whatever the reason.

Gus Gain

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Freeland made the front page of the Charlottetown Guardian on this date in 1949 with the sad news that the body of Augustine “Gus” Gain had been found in the woods.

Elderly Man Perishes In Woods At Freeland

The body of Augustine Gain, 81, was found about ten o’clock on the morning of December 24th in the woods about a mile from his home. He had been missing since the previous day and an all-night search had been carried on.

An investigation was conducted by members of Summerside Detachment R.C.M.P., and the Coroner, Dr. Austine Delaney and it was decided that death was due to natural causes and exposure and that an inquest would not be necessary. The body was frozen when found.

A considerable sum of money was found in various pockets of the clothing. The elderly man had lived alone for a number of years and was last seen alive about noon the day previous when he left the store of A. Philips after procuring supplies and started for his home a mile and a half away.

The day was warm and the walking was heavy. That evening it was noticed by his nephew, James Gain, who lives nearby that there was no light in his uncle’s house and on investigation he found that he was missing. – S

I asked my mother if she remembered someone called Augustine Gain and she said, “Oh yes, Gus Gain. He used to come to our store.” Clinton Morrison’s history of Lot 11, Along the North Shore, says Gus lived in the community of Murray Road, so I asked my mother where Gain’s house was and she replied, “There by the water, you know, by Gain’s Creek.” Of course. There are no more Murrays or Gains in our area, but their names live on.

So there is a typo in the article, as the store mentioned in the article did not belong to A. Philips, but to my father H. Phillips, or rather, H.E. Phillips. Harold Edmund. He used both initials in business, and I have no idea why, except that it probably made him sound more prominent when in fact, in 1949, they were barely scraping by.

It was probably my mother who served Gus that Thursday two days before Christmas, and she could have been the last person to see him alive. The drive from our old store to where Gus lived is only about five minutes by car, but that’s a round about route if you are on foot, so he would have walked a well-worn path through the forest as a short cut. We sometimes used that same path for snowmobiling when I was a child in the 1970s, and I can still pick it out when I look at recent aerial photos. It’s swampy in places back there, would be terrible walking if the ground wasn’t completely frozen.

1935 Aerial Photo

This blog now memorializes two PEI men named Gus who died in 1949.