American By Deforestation

My great great-grandfather, who was also called William Chaisson, was the master builder in the Tee Kay Kickham Shipyard, Souris West, Prince Edward Island. The Chaissons had been building boats since at least 1784. Through the 19^th century the business declined because the forests of Prince Edward Island were steadily depleted and importing wood became too expensive. My ancestors, like most 19^th century business people, did not employ sustainable business practices and they rather literally cut off the limb that they were sitting on.

Phillip Chaisson (1873-1918)This is, in fact, why I am an American and not a Canadian. My great-grandfather Philip Chaisson was born in 1873. He was trained as a builder, but he spent his rather short life designing and constructing buildings, not boats. He and every single one of his brothers (and he had several) emigrated from the island, going to either western Canada or down to New England.

The failure of the boat-building business may have been hastened by the Panic of 1893, which was the worst economic depression to hit the United States and Canada up to that time, and was long regarded as second only to the Great Depression. It was precipitated by the over-expansion of the railroads, which caused a number of bank failures. Another panic followed in 1907. Ten Farms Become a Town: A History of Souris, 1700-1920 notes that the Kickham shipyard would remain best known for the schooners it produced between 1891 and 1907.

In June 2011 Douglas Obey published a report called “Shipbuilding and the Forests of Prince Edward Island.” Obey is a research associate at the Institute of Island Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown. He examined 108 survey reports issued by Lloyd's Register of British and Foreign Shipping and saw marked changes in the types of wood used to build ships between 1836 and 1876. “The main woods used in the hulls of island-built ships (in the order of their frequency of recording in the Lloyd's survey-forms) were spruce, yellow birch, tamarack, beech, and pine, with the two hardwoods (yellow birch and beech) being used primarily in the parts of the hull below the waterline and the three softwoods above the line.”

Obey documented the decline first in the use of yellow birch, beech and pine, with a relative increase in the amount of tamarack used, and then tamarack declined after the 1860s as well as spruce use became dominant through the 1870s. Over the years the disappearance of the hardwoods led to soft wood being used below the waterline. According to Obey, the switch from emphasis on one wood over the other was due at least in part to Lloyd's rating of these woods. Spruce and tamarack built ships were given better “classifications,” so the builders deserted the hardwoods.

My family is from the northeastern corner of the island, which also happened to be one of the strongholds of the coniferous boreal forest on PEI. However, Obey goes on to write that depletion of these forests contributed to the decline in building. “By 1870 tamarack of the size and quality suitable for shipbuilding had been used up to the point where it could no longer contribute significantly to the industry anywhere.

Schooners in Souris harborMy great grandfather was down in Massachusetts by the turn of the 20^th century. My grandfather, whom he named his own father, was born in Haverhill in 1904 and his sister Adelaide (named for his mother), a year or two later. A search of online newspaper records and the search results of genealogists who have collected this newspaper data reveal that my great grandmother Celina Theriault Chaisson died of gasteroenteritis on May 6, 1908. She had been born in the Magdalen Islands in the middle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. I have no idea how she met her husband, except that there is a ferry that runs between Souris and the islands.

My great-grandfather may have been the last of the Francophone generations in eastern PEI. The Magdalene Islands are part of Quebec and would have been monolingual French in the latest 19^th century. Philip Chaisson came from a part of PEI where the Scots out-numbered the French, but he was perhaps still bilingual enough to understand his wife. After she died my grandfather was raised by his mother's brother in Cambridge, where French was his first language. Adelaide was raised by Philip's sister Alice in New Jersey, where she grew up with English as her first language.

Shipyard on the Hillsborough RiverMy great-grandfather returned to Canada. For many years I was told a family story about him dying in the Magdalens while building a church. Then I chanced upon a story about the 125^th anniversary of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) in Souris, written in 2008. The text included a photograph Phillip Chaisson, the first I've ever seen, and the information that he had been the architect of the 1913 bank building (now demolished) and had died in the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918.

So the decline of the shipping industry in PEI led my greatgrandfather to move to the United States. He left his children in the US, moved back to PEI, and died there, buried in the St. Alexis graveyard in Rollo Bay. I visited the island in 2000 and in addition to my great-grandfather's grave, saw an island that is once again forested.