Harvey Station, New Brunswick

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This article is for the Harvey in York County. See also Harvey, Albert County, New Brunswick.

Harvey (also called Harvey Station) and originally part of Harvey Settlement is a village on Harvey Lake, York County, southwestern New Brunswick, Canada, approximately 35 kilometres southwest of Fredericton. As of 2001 the population of the village was 349, although with the inclusion of Manners Sutton south of the village (the original Harvey Settlement) the population was 2231.

Harvey Settlement, owed its origin to a party of Northumberland and Borders immigrants recruited for Stanley (a community in York County north of the St. John River) by the New Brunswick Land Company. Upon their arrival in 1837 they found the Company commissioner absent, and discovered that the Company's inducements had been exaggerated. They appealed to the Legislature and to the Governor, Sir John Harvey, to be permitted to purchase land outside the Company's territory. They were given work on the new St. Andrew's Road and the right to draw lots upon it, in the community that would bear the Governor's name. The party of 137 had arrived at Saint John from Berwick-upon-Tweed aboard the snow Cornelius of Sunderland, and hailed mostly from Northumberland, many being from the town of Wooler or its rural environs.

One of the major early assessions to Harvey settlement following the arrival of the original Cornelius settlers of 1837 were five Little brothers 1840. They were not part of any Northumberland chain migration though, having migrated to New Brunswick in 1832 from Dumfries, Scotland in the western Borders region, although their grandfather had already emigrated to New Brunswick in 1819. They obtained title in 1842 to a 2,000 acre tract to the west of the community that became known as Little Settlement. They in turn influenced their relatives, the Heughan and Lister families, to migrate from Dumfrieshire to join them.

Some friends and close relatives of the Cornelius settlers of 1837 arrived as chain migrants in the community beginning in 1842 (e.g., Moffitts, Swans, Rutherfords), but the numbers were not large. They primarily came from Northumberland and the Borders with very few arriving from elsewhere in Great Britain. These later arrivals primarily settled on lots in the outer tiers of Harvey settlement. Several of these families arrived beginning in 1850 to take up lots in the Capt. John Campbell Block on the southern margin of Harvey Settlement for one dollar per acre. This 1,000 acre block bordering Oromocto Lake became known as Tweedside, named for the Tweed River in the settler's homeland. Other later arrivals, and members of the second generation of the Cornelius party, also obtained lands on the 1,500 acre Simonds and Beauchant tracts that straddled the road between Tweedside and Harvey.

A few other immigrant families also arrived in the community in the 1840's and 1850's independent of each other and previous waves of migrants.

In 1852 the New Brunswick government and the European & North American Railway Company signed a contract for the building of a railway to link the province with Nova Scotia and Maine. By 1869 the section between Saint John and Fredericton had been completed and passed through the extreme northern fringe of Harvey Settlement. The Harvey Station was built in 1869 and extended in 1909. The coming of the railway brought growth and prosperity to Harvey Settlement. The present village came into existence when hotels were built to accommodate train passengers, as well as several stores and mills to provided goods to people in the area. Rail travel eventually went into decline and became supplanted as roadways were improved. By 1962 the Harvey train station was slated for destruction. A portion of the building was rescued from destruction and moved across Harvey Lake on the ice in winter where it is now a cottage in Herbert Cove.

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Village of Harvey

The New Brunswick Land Company and the Settlement of Stanley and Harvey