No one recalls what the weather was like on September 21, 1947, the day the train carrying Anthony and Henrica Daamen and their children rolled into the Hardwood Ridge station near the coal mining town of Minto, New Brunswick.
Perhaps it was an ideal, late-summer day, with warm breezes blowing through the nearby sugar maples, their leaves creating that gentle rustling sound, soft and soothing, an evocative reminder that winter’s icy winds are not far away.
As they unloaded their belongings from the train, Anthony and Henrica would have heard the voices of other passengers talking excitedly in different languages. Their lives profoundly altered by the winds of war, the people to whom those voices belonged, like the Daamens, were coming to New Brunswick from Europe and countries like Lebanon in the Middle East for a new start in one of North America’s oldest coal-mining operations.
As early as 1643, more than 300 years before the Daamen family arrived, the Grand Lake coalfield had been supplying coal to New England. Early operations involved hand stripping along outcrops of the coal seams and using horses to hoist the coal out of shallow shafts. In 1892, steam hoists took over from the horses, and in 1914, steam shovels and draglines first appeared. In 1943, 15 mines operated in Minto, with eight draglines and two power shovels strip-mining between 1,000 and 5,000 tons of coal per machine each month.
Too preoccupied to hear the leaves rustling or think about the coming winter, Anthony and Henrica were thinking not so much that cold weather was near, as that their home, their family and their friends in the Netherlands were far away. Gathering their children close, they stepped off the railway platform into their new life in Minto, confident that everything would work out for the best.
Anthony and Henrica’s story is just one of the hundreds in Minto’s long and colourful history. There was work because of the coal, which attracted people escaping the social and economic ravages of war who wanted to build a better life for themselves and their families. It’s a story as old as humankind, as true today as it was in 1784, when New Brunswick became a colony separate from Nova Scotia, created explicitly as a haven for the Loyalist refugees.
Standing in this Minto cemetery in front of this memorial to the Daamen family and their arrival in New Brunswick, I can’t help but think of my family history and how I wound up here. Had my forbears not left Scotland and the United States to come to Canada, what would my life be like? Where would I be?
Nor can I not think of the hundreds of immigrants to Canada I’ve known over the years, including my Syrian neighbour, who, after escaping the ravages of civil war in his homeland just a few years ago, came to Fredericton with his family and is now running his own restaurant.
Reflecting optimism, strength and resiliency, New Brunswick’s provincial motto — Spem Reduxit/Hope Restored — and the sense of openness and understanding it conveys, guides us in our search for solutions to the economic, social and political challenges we face. The idea of being open — open to new ideas, new ways of seeing the world, and embracing compromise and change — is at the very core of our collective being and our body politic. Restoring hope is what New Brunswick is all about.
No one recalls what the weather was like on September 21, 1947, the day the train carrying the Daamen family rolled into the station at Hardwood Ridge. Perhaps it was an ideal late-summer day, with warm breezes blowing through the nearby sugar maples, their leaves creating that evocative rustling sound, soft and soothing — a lullaby to the human spirit.
