See GC3HWQ3: Historic Saint John Series – County Courthouse for the first in the series.
Saint John is a city steeped in history. Commonly referred to as ‘the Loyalist City’ as well as ‘Canada’s Most Irish City,’ Saint John is Canada's oldest incorporated city (1785). Saint John is home to this country's oldest museum and farmers market. Saint John also established Canada's first police force. This city has been welcoming people from Eastern Europe, England and Ireland for centuries, with each group of immigrants leaving their unique imprint on Saint John culture, architecture and language.
The little peninsula in front of you (as you look West) is a Saint John space known for centuries as the 'Green Mound'. For a very innocuous looking area, it has quite a storied past. Even without any discernible structures, it has become a very famous site in the city. This is where 'Fort La Tour' once stood.
Up to four different cultures were found to have spent time here, as shown by the different layers of circular burial pits found in this very spot. Evidence shows us that prehistoric Red Paint Indians existed here many thousands of years ago, leaving us flints, tools of stone and bone dust to mark their little time.
Indians of the 17th Century period, and quite possibly several centuries before that in fact, favoured the Green Mound and harbour area. They welcomed some company in June of 1604 when French cartographer Samuel de Champlain sailed into the mouth of the river. He named it St. John, after the day it was found, St. Jean Baptiste Day. Champlain was the first European on record to barter with the Indians for furs.
Over time, settlers began using this area more and more for commodity trading. With France displaying interest in 'Acadia', this point was selected in 1631 by Charles de Sainte-Etienne de La Tour, Governor of Acadia, for his trading post. Because of its strategic location and its use by First Nations, La Tour resolved to build a fortified post at the mouth of the Saint John River, the richest source of furs in all Acadia. With this strategically located post, La Tour controlled the largest and the richest river in Acadia, establishing one of the earliest centres of French fur trade with the Aboriginal peoples of the region. Its location at the mouth of the Saint John River virtually guaranteed control of access and traffic to the interior of what had become New France. He reasoned that this would forestall any designs the English might have on that part of the country.
When the new post was completed, it was named 'Fort Sainte-Marie' and Jean-Daniel Chaline, one of La Tour’s lieutenants, was placed in charge of this, the first permanent establishment on the Saint John. The site became LaTour’s base of operations against rival Governor Charles de Menou d’Aulnay, of Port Royal (in current day Annapolis Valley). With increased tensions arising from competition over controlling the lucrative fur trade, matters escalated into a 10-year civil war between the two antagonists. On 18 Sept. 1632, a force of Scots from Port-Royal under command of Capt. Andrew Forrester attacked the new fort, tore down a large cross, damaged the chapel, and plundered the supplies. Not too many months elapsed before La Tour captured the English fort at Machias and pillaged it as a warning that his posts could not be molested with impunity.
La Tour was away in Boston in February 1645, when d’Aulnay attacked the fort but was beaten off with heavy loss. On Easter Sunday April 13, 1645, while La Tour was once again away at Boston in search of food and trade goods, d'Aulnay again sailed across the Bay of Fundy and arrived at La Tour's fort this time with a force of two hundred men. La Tour's soldiers were led by his wife, Françoise-Marie Jacquelin. After a five day battle, on 18 April, d' Aulnay offered quarter to all if Francoise-Marie were to surrender the fort. On that basis, knowing she was badly outnumbered, she capitulated and d’Aulnay had captured La Tour's Fort Sainte-Marie. d'Aulnay then reneged on his pledge of safety for the defenders and treacherously hanged the La Tour garrison while Madame de la Tour was forced to watch with a rope around her neck. Three weeks later, while still in d'Aulnay's hands, she died, some say of a broken heart. News of the capture of his fort and of his wife’s death reached La Tour at Boston while he was still preparing his relief expedition. With the death of his wife and the loss of his fort, La Tour did not return to Acadia for the next four years, until d'Aulnay had died (1650).
Eventually, La Tour gathered several families of colonists, and sailed in the summer of 1653 for Port-Royal. He presented Mme d’Aulnay [Jeanne Motin] with a royal order restoring to him the fort at Saint John. Mme d’Aulnay and La Tour were both heavily in debt and anxious to bring the disastrous rivalry of their two factions to an end.
In time, they married.
On 14 July 1654, an English expedition sent by Oliver Cromwell under the command of Major Robert Sedgwick entered the harbour at Saint John and called for La Tour’s surrender. Having few cannons, almost no ammunition, and a garrison of but 70 men to oppose a force of 500, La Tour was obliged to comply. He was made a prisoner and taken to England. Only in 1656 was he allowed to see Cromwell. He asked for the return of his property on the grounds that England and France had been at peace when the capture took place but Cromwell refused the request, agreeing only to recognize La Tour’s right as a baronet of Nova Scotia as his father’s heir, provided he accepted English allegiance and paid both the amount he owed Boston merchants and the cost of the English garrison that Leverett had maintained at Saint John. Charles accepted these conditions. To raise the some £15,000 involved, La Tour entered into partnership with William Crowne and Thomas Temple. Soon afterwards, in September, 1656, La Tour, possibly finding this enforced arrangement with the English distasteful, sold his rights to his two partners, retaining only a small percentage of the profit. Temple took command of the fort at Saint John and Crowne that at Pentagouet. La Tour appears to have retired with his wife to Cap de Sable and there he died in 1666.
In all, he had been a resident of Acadia for 56 years and his is the name that predominates during most of that period. La Tour and Madame d’Aulnay had five children, in the result they have hundreds of descendants living in the Canadian Maritimes today.
The Green Mound was left to the care of the Indians until the 1760s, when Pre-Loyalist English-speaking settlers from New England began to trickle into the future colony of New Brunswick. Often referred to as Planters, this group included three young partners who set up a trading post on the ruins of Fort La Tour. Simonds, Hazen and White brought their families to settle around their new trading post, and, soon after, the community of Portland Point became a centre of commercial activity. Portland Point and other Planter communities are credited with giving the ill-prepared Loyalists of the 1780s a foothold by supplying necessities in what was, in the settler’s eyes, predominately a wilderness.
Fort La Tour is designated a Provincial Historic Site.
Congrats to ynds on being FTF!