Charlottetown - The Early Years

Charlottetown - The Early Years. . After the end of the Seven Years War (1756-1763) French De St. Jean was placed under the control of the British who, in 1763 promptly remained their new colony St. John's Island. The next year the king surveyor Captain Samuel Holland, conducted a survey of the Island and concluded that "Charlotte - Town" Should be the capital because this side of the island cannot have a fishery it may probably be thought expedient to indulge it with some particular privileges. Named in honour of Queen Charlotte, the consort of King George III of England, the site was situated at the junction of Hillsborough and York rivers and across the harbor from the early French capital of Port la Joie. This location offered an excellent harbour which could be easily defended - an important consideration during g a time of almost continuous strife between Endlgna and France. , With ample-level land, situated on a gentle slope with a southern exposure, and well-supplied with water, the site occupied approximately 270 acres for building lots and an additional 565 acres for common land., Early settlement in the new Capital progressed slowly with very few houses at first, and until farming commenced very little food as well. When Walter Patterson the first governor of the colony arrived in 1770, he had to build a small house to keep out a little of the approaching cold. Because the colony was so poorly financed there was little money available for the construction of roads, streets, and buildings - all the things which constitute a town. Patterson and his surveyor, Thomas Wright finished laying out the town according to the standards established by the order concept of eighteenth-century urban life. The streets were wide and at right angles to each other, creating a well-defined pattern of city "blocks" with five or ten lots per block. Four squares provided the citizens with "green space" in each quarter of the town and at the centre of this orderly grid was the central attraction, Queen Square, intended as the official heart ot the little colonial capital. Just outside the original town grid was a common and beyond that were the pasture lots. , Charlottetown's eighteenth-century town plan, with its straight lines, perspectives, and centers of interest, might have deserved handsome and harmonious rows of stone and brick structures; but what it actually got was straggling and irregular line of wooden shops and houses, clap-boarded or shingled and painted in the prevailing and depressing Maritime tones of dull brown or slate gray. It was a small, plain unpretending, unprepossessing place, an Island, unfrequented and almost inaccessible for nearly half the year, and cherishing in its most concentrated, quintessential from the jealous and suspicious parochialism that was so characteristic of British North America. People said disparagingly that nothing could ever happen in Charlestown, but this change was utterly untrue. Charlottetown possessed in itself an almost infinite capacity for excitement, arguments, and controversies..., The town was settled by government officials, civil servants, military personnel, and immigrants from England, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as a smattering of Empire Loyalists who came from the American colonies as a result of the American Revolution. Growth was slow in the city, with the population increasing at an almost imperceptible pace. By 1806, it is said that there were not more than seventy houses in Charlottetown. By the time of the Charlestown Conference in 1864, after one hundred years of settlement, the town and the surrounding royalty were home to barely seven thousand people. , Captions: Wright-Patterson Plans of Charlottetown, 1771 Le plan Wright-Patterson de Charlottetown, 1771 Governor Walter Patterson Gouverneur Walter Patterson Quai de la Confederation Landing Charlottetown 1863 Hillsborough or Eant River Surveyor General Samuel Holland Arpenteur Ge`ne`ral Samuel Holland Charlottetown, 1778 Charlottetown, 1849 Charlottetown, 1849 Charlottetown Royalty, 1843