Professional Work Stories
Dr. Robert J. Morgan
Cape Bretoners are well recognized for their work in the coal mines and industries like steel and fishing, but we often forget the professional and entrepreneurial aspect of the island’s working culture. Many community leaders were drawn from the professional classes. Newspapermen like D.W. Jones, the first editor of the Port Hood Greetings, provided their communities with important information. A great deal of work at the Greetings was done by hand-typesetting, layout, even folding and handling papers. The paper was published without the help of electricity and so in these early offices “professional” certainly didn’t mean “sedentary.”
What of commerce? The Jerseymen ran the fishery with an iron hand, but like the general stores, they imported exotic goods like tea or molasses to remote areas of the island. They provided jobs and their outlets served as social centres. Entrepreneurial families, like the Archibalds of North Sydney, founded the early industries on the island. In the Archibalds we see the rise of a professional family that immigrated to North Sydney where they invested in shipbuilding, helping to make North Sydney the shipping hub of Canada in its early years. They went on to invest in coal mines, helping again to fuel considerable employment on the island. Members of the family eventually served in both the provincial and federal governments.
None of this would have been possible without education. The early Scots had hardly arrived here when schools were organized, and by 1839 Boularderie Academy, established in rural Cape Breton, had already enrolled sixty pupils from all over the island. Its founder, Alexander Munro, and his wife Catherine laboured in the Academy for years and before long their scholars were all over Canada, educating others. Many of the women who moved from their hometowns to run the one-room schoolhouses of the island brought not only formal learning but cultivated tastes to their pioneer students.
© C@P Society of Cape Breton County, 2009
