Bathurst

Bathurst, New Brunswick, Canada, is a city of approximately 13,000, situated at the south- ernmost part of Chaleur Bay, on Bathurst Har- bour, an estuary at the mouth of four rivers: the Nepisiguit, the Middle, the Little, and the Tetagouche. Chaleur Bay–“The Bay of Warmth” –was so named by Jacques Cartier, the first European to visit the area, in 1534. Permanent settlement in the region dates back more than 350 years, when, in 1619, the first missionaries arrived and established a Récollet Mission on the shores of Nepisiguit Bay. First called Ne- pisiguit, then St. Peters, Bathurst received its current name in 1826 after then-British colonial secretary,Henry Bathurst, third Earl of Bathurst. Today, Bathurst is officially a bilingual municipality with French, Irish, Scottish, and English heritage. The Bathurst area has thick woodland with multiple bodies of water. As a result, shipbuilding, logging and sawmills formed the basis of the lo- BATHURST, NEW BRUNSWICK A town in transition Bathurst, New Brunswick cal economy during the 19th century,when the community emerged as a regional trade hub. Farming and fishing remained the mainstay of its outlying rural communi- ties. In 1871 Bathurst had a population of 600. By the turn of the 20th century, Bathurst had be- come a busy seaport, and a port of entry on the Inter- colonial and the Caraquet and Gulf Shore Railways. It had a post office, 35 stores, six hotels, a steam saw- mill, a shingle mill, a flour mill, three fish freezers, two carriage factories, a printing shop, three churches, and a population of 3,000. It incor- porated as a town in 1912. Pulp and paper domi- nated the local economy during the early decades of the century, after the Bathurst Power and Paper Company opened the city’s first pulp mill in 1914. It quickly became Bathurst’s largest employer and brought prosperity to the entire region. The mill was expanded to make paper in