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settled here, for we have seen that Messrs. Simonds and White, soon after their arrival, engaged in the manufacture and shipment of lime, pursued the fishery at various points in the Bay of Fundy, established an extensive trade in furs and peltries with the Indians, furnished supplies to the garrison at Fort Frederick, erected a saw mill and grist mill, built and launched a schooner, constructed weirs, supplied the settlers at Maugerville and St. Anns with such things as they required, and maintained regular communication with Newburyport and Boston by means of the vessels they owned or chartered.

The coming of so considerable a number of white settlers to the River St. John in the course of two or three years after the issuing of Governor Lawrence's proclamations, rendered it necessary that measures should be adopted for the government of the new community. The original province of Nova Scotia had been divided into counties in the year 1759 at which time the entire province of New Brunswick seems to have been an unorganized part of the County of Cumberland. For the first year or two the settlements on the river St. John were obliged to look to Halifax for the regulation of their civil affairs, but this proved so inconvenient that the Governor and Council of Nova Scotia agreed to the establishment of the St. John river district as a new county, under the name of the County of Sunbury. This county did not, as has been been commonly supposed, include the whole of the province of New Brunswick. Its eastern boundary was a line running due north from a point on the shore of the Bay of Fundy twenty miles east of Mispec point, so that the eastern part of the present province of New Brunswick remained a part of the county of Cumberland until the division of the old province of Nova Scotia in 1784.