A century ago, river wharfs were a lifeline for residents. Now they're getting a facelift

The river wharf has been a constant in Sharon Cunningham's life for as long as she can remember.

She swims off her local wharf daily in the summer months, near her home in Hatfield Point. And growing up, she spent a lot of nights on the wharf, too — even if her mother didn't always approve.

"I was the girl whose mother said, 'you must not go down to the wharf this evening!'" she said.

"It was a time of parties, youth. It was a good time. And that was part of my memories of wharfs. And of course, swimming off them. I live near a wharf. And daily, I swim off that wharf."

Those ties to the wharf are a good fit for her current job as president of the St. John River Society. She and her fellow volunteers are the stewards of 13 public wharfs — all of which are getting major repairs this summer.

The work is happening thanks to a $970,000 grant from the Canada Community-Building Fund. The society applied for the funds and received them in the fall of 2022. But because of last summer's heavy rainfall and high water levels, the repair work is happening now.

Cunningham says if the wharfs were left as is, it would only be a matter of time before they were lost forever.

WATCH | 'An opportunity to bring the river back to the people'

Built at the turn of the century, this wharf is getting a facelift

4 months ago

Duration 4:53

More than a dozen public wharves in New Brunswick are getting repaired, many for the first time since they were built more than a century ago as a lifeline for communities along the St. John River system.

"We would not be standing on this wharf. And up and down this river, there were 34 wharfs that were still viable in 1990. There were probably 50 in 1890. So, there's been a loss already.… This is what we've got left."

Hubs for produce, passengers and picnics

It was May 20, 1816, when the first steamboat, the General Smyth, plied its way up the St. John River, from Saint John to Fredericton. It was the fourth steamboat to ever operate in North America.

For the next 130 years, those steamboats fuelled the need for wharfs along the St. John River.

They would soon become crucial access points, says George Lacey, the Queenstown Wharf steward with the St. John River Society.

The wharfs were "mainly for local people so they could have some place to get public access to the water," he said. "I mean, not everyone owns land on the water around here."

Farmers would ship their produce through the wharfs. And lumber was carried by boat, too.

"The railroad didn't go through until around the end of the First World War. So, everything had to be shipped by boat. That was the main source of transportation, this wharf here."

All his life, Lacey has lived just a few hundred metres away from the Queenstown Wharf. He says his earliest memory of the wharf was as a kid in the 1950s, "coming down here and wondering how I was going to walk over all the broken stone and rebar that was sticking up."

Lacey says the wharfs have gone through many iterations. 

In the 1800s, it was common for goods to be loaded onto small skiffs from the shore, and then rowed out to 30-metre-long steamboats. In the 1920s, the federal government built concrete structures. 

And in the 1990s, the federal government transferred the ownership and management of the wharfs to local groups and municipalities. The St. John River Society took over ownership of 13 wharfs — including Queenstown — to ensure their survival and public access.

Patching up cracks, replacing wooden beams

Few families in New Brunswick know wharfs as intimately as the Duceys do. 

When the St. John River Society asked contractor Jarvis Ducey to repair the wharfs, the group was relieved when he said yes.

"I'm supposed to be retired. But [retirement] is a nasty word," he joked.

"I started back in the 1970s with my father. There's a wharf every 20 miles or so up this river. We've overhauled a lot of them, probably 10 or 12 of them.… And these are kind of a hobby now, just going back to these little ones," Ducey said.

At the Queenstown Wharf, there are cracks in the concrete that need patching up, and the wooden sheathing that protects the front of the wharf needs replacing.

Ducey's no stranger to the work, but installing the new 12-foot-long hemlock beams is not for the faint of heart.

He's outsourced that particular job to his son, Jason Ducey, who has to stand on a floating raft in order to drill the wood into the wharf.

"The other day, the waves were coming almost to the top of this wharf, so he's trying to drill that hole, standing on the raft, and the raft's like a trampoline, picking him right up and he has to hold the drill level. He went home that night and said, 'oh my land. I got sea legs, I can't stand.'"

But Jarvis Ducey says choppy waves are nothing compared to the backbreaking manual labour that went into building these wharfs a century ago.

"They worked themselves right into the ground. I mean, they mixed cement by hand. There some of these wharfs that would take, what, 10 truckloads of cement or maybe more … and they got the gravel off the beach."

Ducey says this work on the wharf is more than just a repair job to him.

"It's part of history. And if you lose them, what are you going to have? Nothing. You can't get 'em back. There's not enough money in the government or in New Brunswick to replace all these wharfs.… If you tried to build 37 wharfs today, you'd be looking at billions of dollars."

"If they can spend a little now and get another 10, 20 years out of them, why not? I mean they're throwing money other places."

Spreading the word

Sharon Cunningham is surprised at how often she encounters New Brunswickers who know nothing about the public river wharfs. 

"These wharfs don't even have civic numbers. And in fact, talking to various planners, [they say] 'Well, we know there's a wharf there, but it's not numbered. We can't find it on our maps,'" she says. "This is how little-known these wharfs are.… They are one of the best kept secrets of New Brunswick."

When Cunningham thinks about a perfect day on the wharf in 2024, it looks something like this.

"There will be boats tied up here. There would be kids swimming off here. There'd be people fishing off here. And that's exactly what's happening right now. People need to see this, and they need to find these wharfs to be able to enjoy these wharfs again.… Let's just keep up the tradition."

Cadan Webb, 14, isn't someone who needs a public awareness campaign about the wharfs. In the summer months, she walks down to the Queenstown Wharf from her home almost daily.

On a sunny Wednesday morning, she stood at the edge of the wharf, barefoot, trying to catch a fish with her great-grandfather's rod. 

"I saw my dad's fishing rod and so I wanted to try it. He taught me how to use the rod. He just told me about the button you have to press so the line will go out and how you have to bob it up and down to attract the fish."

When she's not fishing, Cadan is swimming off the wharf with her cousins. She says while the wharf seems to be in decent shape, she has noticed some cracks.

"When I went underwater with goggles on, there are, like, cracks and little crevices and stuff in the foundation. It's good that they're fixing that up."

Cunningham says seeing kids like Cadan at Queenstown is proof of the wharf's value for the generations to come.

"I'll tell you, it was a joy to see Cadan on the wharf today with her fishing rod and anticipating catching fish. It's a treat… And our pleasure with the St. John River Society is to make it known that everyone can have access to these wharfs."