Page:New Brunswick Magazine Issue 1.djvu/83
Marsh Creek], thence bounded by said cove till it comes to Red Head on the east aide of the cove, thence running north eleven degrees and fifteen minutes west till it meets the Canebekessis river, thence bounded by said river, the River St. John's and harbor, till it comes to the first mentioned boundary, with allowance for bad lands and containing on the whole by estimation 2,000 acres more or less.
When afterwards surveyed, this grant was found to contain 5,496 acres, so that the allowance for bad lands must be considered as tolerably liberal. The line running from Simonds' house eastward to Courtenay Bay is that now followed by Union street. It will be observed that the peninsula south of this street (laid out in 1783 as Parr-town) was not included in the grant. The principal object of the grantees was to secure "the marsh" and the limestone quarries, and they probably deemed the land south of Union street so rocky and forbidding as to be hardly worth the quit rents.
Red Head, mentioned as one of the bounds of the grant, was at that time a more prominent, but probably not a more conspicuous object than at present. The bluff extended further out into the bay and further up shore towards the mouth of Little River, and it was covered with shrubbery down to the water, with tall trees on the summit. A settler named Robert Cairns lived there in early times, and in his evidence in a certain lawsuit he states that in the spring of the year 1787 there was a tremendous land slide, or as he expresses it, "the bank broke off." He was absent in the city at the time and on his return, seeing what had happened, was much alarmed, thinking his family had been "buried in the ruins;" fortunately this turned out not to have been the case. The appearance of the soil freshly exposed caused Red Head, in spite of its diminished proportions, to be even more conspicuous than before.
It may be well, before we proceed to consider the progress of events at St. John, to mention some important changes that took place in the company first