Although she was a small child at the time, Connie Denby remembers Labor Day 1953 like it was yesterday.
It was the day her family left Upper Hibernia, a New Brunswick community that no longer exists after being absorbed by CFB Gagetown.
“It was raining so hard and we were all crying,” Denby said.
The family was moving to a new home being built in nearby Queenstown and she was due to start Grade 2 at her new school the next day.
Connie Denby was just seven years old when her family was forced from their land in Hibernia. She clearly remembers the traumatic day they left. (Steven Webb/CBC)
“Everyone was crying and upset and we put as much personal belongings and furniture in the back of a flatbed logging truck as we could get.”
“It was traumatic. Although at a young age, I still remember it well because so many people were going through the same thing.”
Her family was one of about 750 living in 20 communities who were forced from their homes by the largest expropriation in New Brunswick’s history.
Places with names like Dunn’s Corner, Coote Hill, New Jerusalem, Clones, Armstrong’s Corner and Summer Hill will disappear along with Hibernia.
Denby said her hometown, like others, is a tight-knit community.
“Most of the men worked in the woods in the winter and farmed in the summer,” she said, “with just a few dairy cows and a team of horses and what have you. But everyone stepped in.”
The school in Upper Hibernia where Connie Denby attended first grade. The area was dotted with one-room schoolhouses (Base Gagetown Community History Association)
“There was a community center and churches and schools … there was a general store that also doubled as a post office, and it was a gathering place.”
“And the lady who lived there at one time – we had a copy of a five-year diary that she had, not a single word of gossip in it – but she wrote down every day what the temperature was, what the weather was, who stopped by, who might have been there for dinner,” Denby recalled.
“I don’t know how the lady managed it. Almost all who came stayed for dinner or tea. … People looked out for each other and if there were difficulties, they were there to help.”
But in July 1952, this quiet country life would change dramatically.
“Scout Camps”
Ottawa had been in search of a national training area since the end of World War II.
The Army struggled to train large formations at home in what one officer said at the time were “overgrown Boy Scout camps.”
It was such a problem, Canada had to send units destined for Korea to a major American base to train.
New Brunswick has been lobbying hard to be home to the new base to create what will initially be the province’s sixth-largest employer.
When the final decision was made, the people who lived in this area of the lower St. John River Valley were shocked to learn that their homes were in the army’s sights.
The late Bill Clark was then a veteran of the war and had recently married into a young family living in Hibernia.
One of hundreds of farms in the remote areas. Connie Denby says that farming and logging were the main occupations of the residents there. (Base Gagetown Community History Association)
Speaking to CBC News in 2003, seven years before his death, he described the Department of National Defense buyer, a man named Frank Miller, as “a very smooth talker” and a “tough customer.”
“They found the people who were maybe willing to come to terms and walk away, and they came to terms with them, you know,” Clark recalls, “Well, then that made it inevitable that it would happen, so then they started to push others.”
Some resisted, at least for a while.
“A few fought back and went to Ottawa to try to get information and convince the authorities,” Denby said. “But it just happened and certainly some people were happy to move because some people were maybe not as prosperous as others.”
Denby said Ottawa was able to tap into a population that had deep loyalist roots and had just been through the hardships of a war — people who generally trusted the government.
Farmers at a public meeting in Gagetown check a map to see if their property falls within the proposed CFB Gagetown in this August 1952 newspaper photo (Gagetown Base Community History Association)
“It’s just amazing that it happened. It certainly wouldn’t have happened today… there would have been an uprising, let’s say.’
A reporter from MacLean’s magazine visited the new base in 1954 and described what he saw.
“In it hundreds of farms, cultivated since the days of the United Empire Loyalists, lie deserted… Dirt roads wind through dark forests past ghost villages whose people have sold out to Ottawa and moved on. Numbers painted on every empty house, every school, church, barn and toilet mean the army has taken over.”
In what has been described as the most complicated land deal in the province’s history, the army paid off almost 1,100 settlements.
The Army also agreed to maintain nearly 30 cemeteries and allow families to return for special occasions such as reunions and funerals.
A Canadian soldier holds a number against an outbuilding on the base’s grounds. The Army has numbered and photographed every building on nearly 1,100 properties. (Base Gagetown Community History Association)
Bob Johnson, who lived in New Jerusalem until he was 11, said the attachment to the area hasn’t gone away.
“It’s always there,” he said. “It’s home. And people say, ‘Oh, I’m going home.’ It doesn’t matter where they live.”
“Just recently I visited a family and they were living in the same place, an original grant, that their grandfather and great grandfather had.
“And I said, ‘You know, the only thing I miss about the New Jerusalem not being there anymore is the fact that we no longer have this ancestral place to go to.’
The Queenstown Orange Lodge Hall was originally on the expropriated grounds known as Hall No. 4 at Dunn’s Corner and was moved here in 1954. It is a traditional meeting place for former residents each July for the annual Orange Lodge picnic. (Steven Webb/CBC)
It’s the day of the annual picnic on July 12 at the Loyal Orange Lodge Hall in Queenstown, just on the outskirts of the base. This has become a traditional annual meeting place for people who once lived there.
The hall was moved to Queenstown from the base in 1954. It was at Dunn’s Corner where it was known as Hall No. 4.
On the inner wall there is a picture of a dance in Hall No.4. Based on the clothing worn by the dancers in the photo, it is likely from the late 1940s or early 1950s.
On the opposite wall is a large map of the main property, with former communities marked.
The map is surrounded by black and white photographs of buildings from these communities, buildings long gone.
The map in the hall of the Queenstown Orange Lodge showing the communities in the area that once existed in the training area, with photos of buildings around. (Steven Webb/CBC)
On this warm Saturday, about 30 members of the Base Gagetown Community History Association gathered before a picnic dinner to begin talking about the group’s future.
Established in 1998 by former residents of the area, it has spent more than two decades collecting photographs, documents and family histories.
But almost 70 years since expropriation forced them from the place they called home, the number of people who actually remember those events is dwindling.
The group’s Facebook page these days is mostly obituary posting.
“In 2006 there were 217 members and in 2022 we’re down to 83 members,” Denby, who is the association’s president, told the assembled group.
She is one of the youngest, at 76 years old.
Members of the Base Gagetown Community History Association meet July 9 to discuss the future of the organization. (Michael Wallace/BGCHA Facebook)
Denby believes the time has come to officially close the association.
“I definitely have mixed feelings,” she said. “But people are certainly getting older… And as sad as it is to lose that social connection, I feel like it’s time to move on.”
This leaves the question of what to do with the material the group has collected.
“There are many, many plastic bags full of information,” Denby said. “And it seems like maybe we add more every year because we had a booth at the Queens County Fair every September … and we just kept piling on more information and pictures and what have you.
“And it’s going to be quite a task to sort through the material and keep what’s important and maybe even consider throwing some of it away.”
It is hoped that the provincial archives will be the eventual home of this material and that the archives can also take over the work on the association’s website.
This map contains the locations of the former communities superimposed within the boundaries of the current base, now officially known as the 5th Canadian Division Support Base. (CBC/Google Maps)
Provincial Archivist Fred Farrell said the group has been in contact and the archives are interested in taking over the material.
“They did a wonderful thing by getting hold of this material, and they did it probably better than any outside agency could have done,” Farrell said.
“People have to trust you to give you these things. And because they knew these people, they were, you know, in the past, they were their neighbors or their parents were their neighbors, and so they had that trust. “
Farrell said if the archives took over the material, his staff would likely have a big job sorting through what was valuable and what wasn’t, and would rely on the association for help.
“When the organization does that, sometimes they make connections between things that aren’t obvious … because they know things so well that they make those connections.”
The United Church in New Jerusalem. Bob Johnson attended Sunday school here as a child. (Basic history of the Gagetown community…
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