Lower St. John River hill once home to cutting-edge telecommunications tech
Optical telegraphs drastically cut down on communication time
While access to cell service and high-speed internet can still be issues in parts of the Lower St. John River Valley, in the late 18th century, the area was at the forefront of telecommunications.
Several sites, including the top of a hill in Evandale, were home to visual telegraph stations, a revolutionary piece of infrastructure that drastically cut the time it took to send and receive messages.
"Prior to the visual telegraph, the fastest that a human being could communicate with another human being in writing was going to be about [160] kilometres … a day," said Roadside History explorer James Upham.
But with the visual telegraph, a message could easily reach Halifax from Fredericton in a matter of minutes.
What is a virtual telegraph?
Essentially, a virtual telegraph system consists of several signal stations that have line-of-sight communication with each other.
Operators at one station would send the message using various means — flags, wooden arms, for instance — that were then seen by a station farther down the line by telescope.
The message would then be relayed to the next station down the line until it reached its destination.
A little cumbersome in today's world of instantaneous communication, but it would've been revolutionary in those earlier days, Upham said.
"Prior to this, if you wanted to send a complicated message any kind of distance, your best bet was to write a letter, give it to somebody with a horse, have that person ride their horse as far as they could as fast as they could until their horse was exhausted, get on a fresh horse and then ride that one as far as they could as fast as they could."
International arms race
The technology was created by Claude Chappe, a French inventor, in the 1790s.
But the idea was cribbed by Prince Edward Augustus, the Duke of Kent, who, while best known as the father of Queen Victoria, was also in charge of British forces in North America and stationed in Halifax.
The speed of the visual telegraph would've been obvious to the commander.
"If a strange ship was coming up the bay, a message could be dispatched to Fredericton and Halifax in a matter of minutes saying, 'Hey, do we know who this is or what they're doing?'" Upham said.
The original ambitious plan was to have the system stretch from Halifax to Quebec City, as well as up the St. John River and along the Bay of Fundy coast.
"The line crossed from Nova Scotia at Chignecto to just west of Martins Head, where Telegraph Brook still marks the place," wrote New Brunswick historian William Francis Ganong in his 1899 book A Monograph of Historic Sites in the Province of New Brunswick.
"The second of the known telegraph hills was at [Saint John] near the Martello tower."
Where exactly the line travelled from Saint John, or how far it travelled, is a bit of a mystery. But it never reached Quebec City.
"Our histories are silent as to this system and whether it ever came into use," wrote Ganong.
"Doubtless in the military records in England a full account of it is to be found."
While most evidence of the system of visual telegraphs has been lost to time, there are some signs they were there.
"On LiDAR, it comes out really, really clearly what appears to be the foundation for the block house that was associated with the tower," Upham said, referring to the use of light detection technology.
"Ganong mentions hiking up to the top of that hill, finding the foundation and still being able to find timbers from the tower that had by that point collapsed."
With files from Khalil Akhtar