Life along the river
When you could travel from town to town on the tramcar.
There are times that public works crews digging will still hit the remnants of what was one of the first systems of public transit in Nova Scotia – tram cars.
According to historian James Cameron, the system of electric-powered cars on rails ran from 1904 to 1931 in Pictou County and helped spur economic growth in the area.
While the New Glasgow Electric Company was the first to make a proposal for an electric car system in the late 1800s it was brothers Charles A. And Leonard T. Flaherty who brought the dream to fruition bringing hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment to build the transit system that ran from Trenton through New Glasgow, Stellarton and Westville.
The Flaherty brothers were natives of Saint John, N.B., who grew up in Massachusetts and moved to Pictou County in 1900.
In his book on the topic James Cameron writes “Charles junior and Leonard became associates of a Boston financier, W.B. Rogers. At the turn of the century Rogers was interested in extending his enterprises. He and the Flaherty brothers (Leonard was twenty-nine) investigated areas of potential profit in Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes with resulting decision that the East River industrial area of Pictou County with its collieries, steel making, and foundries offered promising prospects for a service industry.
Although none had had previous experience, they chose an electric street railway as a means of capitalizing upon an area they considered to be a budding Pittsburgh.”
The tram route was about nine miles long. Construction began in 1903 and finished in the early fall of the following year.
The tracks ran from downtown Trenton along Trenton Road to the corner of MacLean and Provost streets, which was at the time known as Goodman’s Corner in New Glasgow.
They then turned west on Maclean Street to the East River and connected to the Westside over a bridge.
The track then ran under the Acadian Coal Company’s Coal Chute Rail line turned north and ran about 300 feet along Blair Street to George Street and then turned west until they turned south onto Stellarton Road.
The rails were laid on the west side of Stellarton Road to the New Glasgow boundary and through Lourdes where Stellarton Road becomes Foord Street. From there they went along the west side of Foord through Red Row to the car barns at the corner of Foord-Bridge streets in Stellarton.
Through Stellarton’s business district on Foord Street the rails were in the street centre.
At Acadia corner they turned west onto Acadia Avenue and continued to MacQuarrie’s corner in Westville. There they turned north and were laid along Westville’s Main Street to where West and Main Street intersect. Later some spurs were built as well as an extension into Parkdale.
The project had to be approved by all the councils of the existing towns in the area including Westville, Stellarton and New Glasgow. Trenton had not been incorporated at the time. The charter was granted to the Egerton Tramway Company Ltd.
Charles started off as a manager of the company and Leonard as assistant, eventually becoming president and vice president.
The tram car line officially opened on Oct. 14, 1904. It cost five cents at the time to travel from one town to another. That price would later climb to 10 cents.
At the time of the grand opening the local paper, The Eastern Chronicle wrote: The “city of the four towns” by the valley of the East River are now doubly connected by rail and it is only reasonable to hope that they will all work henceforth together for the good of the whole. Let there be no petty jealousies to keep them apart in sentiment, but let them be linked together in the bonds of good citizenship as long as they exist.
While the system may not have lasted for a long time it did serve to connect the towns and further established New Glasgow as an economic centre for the area as customers were soon easily able to travel from their homes to the larger stores of New Glasgow.
One men’s clothing store even offered to buy a tram ticket for every dollar spent.