Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 1

There is no evidence that Joseph Garrison was of this number. All that can now be learned about him warrants the belief that he was an Englishman, who was found upon the spot by the second, if not already by the first, immigrants from Rowley. We know positively that on his thirtieth birthday, August 14, 1764, he was married to Daniel Palmer's daughter Mary, perhaps in that church which ‘Richard Eastiek [Estey] and Ruth¹ his wife, Jonathan Smith and Hannah his wife,’ were dismissed from, the First Church in Rowley, to form ‘upon or near St. John's River, Nova Scotia,’ May 20, 1764. Sabine, who, with doubtful propriety, includes Joseph Garrison in his Loyalists of the American Revolution, (1.464) styles him ‘of Massachusetts’; but the name has not been met with in that State before the present century by the most diligent searchers of her archives. His comparatively early death will account for the ² diversity of traditions in regard to him among his own descendants, the most trustworthy of which is, that he was not a native of the colonies but of the mother country. The location of his grant is unrecorded, but traditionally was higher up the river than his fatherin-law's. Sabine, again, says he was remembered in New Brunswick ‘as a skilful miner, and as the discoverer of the “Grand Lake coal Mines,” which of late years have been extensively worked.’ Grand Lake is the lowest part of the broad basin extending from Fredericton to the hills beyond the Jemseg, which at every spring freshet is covered by the swollen waters of the St. John. It is not unlikely that its shores were curiously visited by Joseph Garrison, and that he was the first to notice its very obvious superficial bituminous coal³ deposits. But the mining there, as late as 1850, was carried on ‘in a small and rude manner,’ and as late as 1830 only ‘by strippings or open diggings’; so that