rfmcdonald | [BRIEF NOTE] The Boston States (Reply)

Dr. Allan J. MacRae's "The Move to Boston,", transcribed from the West Prince Graphic's paper of May 19, 1999, describes the presence of the "Boston States" in the collective imagination of the Maritimes rather nicely.

'There's no work here.' Prince Edward Island adieu, was the lament of many a young man (and women, too) in West Prince by the late 1890s. The boom years of pioneer settlement, construction and trade had slowed considerably. The 1890s witnessed a period of steady decline and the inset of economic depression. The lure of the "Boston States" where employment was plentiful was simply too great to resist. For many, temporary employment was to become permanent.

J. Clinton Morrison Jr. in his excellent history of Lot 11, along the North Shore, provides an interesting glimpse of those days when Islanders migrated to New England looking for work. He writes: "After the population of Lot 11 peaked in 1891, a steady decline set in. The single most important destination for Islanders who emigrated during the last quarter of the 19th century was Boston, and by 1990 annual excursions to the "Boston States" for temporary and permanent employment was commonplace in Lot 11, as elsewhere in Prince County."

Many went during the winter to find employment in the Maine lumber woods or during the summer to seek jobs in the greater Boston area in construction, domestic work and with the ice companies such as Blue Hill. By 1880 half of all Islanders in the United States were in Massachusetts, notably the Boston area. They sought and found employment as mill-workers, plasterers, mariners, ship carpenters, blacksmiths, painters, cabinet-makers, streetcar drivers, laborers, and in many areas of business and professional life. Many single girls and widowed ladies went to find domestic employment or to work in dressmaking, as shop clerks, nurses or to operate boarding houses.

From the 1880s to the early 1900s regular steamship communication existed between Saint John, NB and Eastport, Portland and Boston, in the New England States. Ships of the Eastern Steamship Company's Palace Steamers operated excursions two or three times weekly between these points carrying Island workers away, many permanently, from rural Island communities such as those in Lot 11. For others, the Intercolonial Railway and other trunk lines conveyed scores of Lot 11 people around North American and as far west as California where many of their descendants still reside. By 1911 a First Class fare from Summerside to Boston on the eastern Steamship Company's excursion rate still cost $8.25.

E.B. Lapointe's "Maritimers in the 'Boston States'" written for Genealogy Today, provides a more personal take on this emigration and its effects.

From the late 1800s to the early 1900s, many members from both of my father's and mother's families went to the Boston States to look for work.

For example, my great-aunt Louise Barclay from Jordan Falls, Nova Scotia, went to the famous Fanny Brown Cooking School in Boston to learn to cook for a living. My second cousin, Walter Hichens, went to Maine, and eventually became a state senator from the area around Bethel.

Other great aunts and uncles also went to the United States to look for work, and although they all became American citizens, they would return home to Nova Scotia every summer, and I would sit in the living room and listen to their stories. Then we would then visit them, and I would see them live their stories in their everyday life and wonder at the excitement of it all.

Thousands of Maritimers went to the Boston States. Nova Scotia genealogists estimate that today there are nearly 4 million descendants of these people--those who travelled the steamships between Yarmouth, Nova Scotia and Boston, Massachusetts in a day--who live in the United States, and also now around the world.

As Macrae notes, "[t]he close ties between the "Boston States" and the Island in general remained strong for many years after Island people had made their permanent homes there. Even in the Boston area itself, Islanders were long able to maintain their unique "Island" identify and to preserve kinship ties both there and "back home". This relationship with the New England area in general was quite noticeable when relatives came home to visit during the summer. These American cousins were considered to hail from little more than a geographic extension of the Maritime Provinces whereas friends and relatives who visited from "out west" or "Upper Canada" were not accorded the same recognition."