NAMING THE STREETS IN LOUISBOURG

It is not until the town was incorporated in 1901 that there is an official record of streets being named. According to Mayor W. W. Lewis the streets had to be named officially ". . . to meet demands of the insurance companies."¹¹ The mayor was correct in this. Insurance companies wanted to know the types of structures and layout of a town in order to establish insurance rates and limit the company's loss in the event of a fire.¹²

A committee, chaired by Councillor James MacPhee was struck to propose names. It was on the advice of the committee that Council adopted the following names for the streets of Louisbourg in December 1902.

"The street from the Sydney and Louisburg railway station to Jerret's bridge will be known as Main Street, from Jerret's bridge to the town limits, going toward Old Town will be Wolf street, the lower street, generally called Water street, will in future be Commercial street. The other streets are Albert, Church, Edward, Alexander, Aberdeen, Warren and Minto Streets. One or two smaller streets have not yet been named. The south side of the town will be known as Havenside and that portion from Jerret's bridge to the town limits on the Louisburg road is named Riverdale."¹³

Many of the remaining streets are named by the time the 1908 McAlpine Directory was issued. These include Victoria, Elwood, Lorway, Townsend, Britannic, Milton, Pepperrell, Beatrice, Tanner's Lane, Spencer and Wallace streets.

The 1914 McAlpine Directory shows only one change of note. Edward Street, named by Council in 1902, has disappeared.¹⁴

UPGRADING THE NEW STREETS

The official naming of the streets was accompanied by a concerted effort to enlarge and upgrade. By November of 1902 the $4,000.00 voted by the ratepayers for street improvements for that year was spent.¹⁵

James Dowd received the contract to lay the plank sidewalk along Main Street beginning in August 1902.¹⁶ This would be extended along all of the Main Street until replaced in 1914 by new sidewalks of ashes.¹⁷

But, improvements did not go along without problems. By March 1903 some of the ratepayers were complaining that there was too much money being spent on sidewalks. They felt that " . . . a sidewalk was not necessary as yet in their town." The correspondent for the Sydney Record pointed out that the state of the streets made sidewalks a necessity. He suggested that a sidewalk along Commercial Street would be useful because of the mud.¹⁸

While sidewalks were an answer to the problem of mud for pedestrians, they did not solve the problem of muddy streets. At a Town Council meeting in March, Councillor Spencer suggested that coal ash which was free for the taking be put on the streets at intersections.¹⁹ It is not known how the town responded to this suggestion, though Jean Kyte remembers that ash was used on the town streets for years. But the discussion in Council does point out the serious problems faced by towns in constructing and maintaining streets. Nor was this a problem restricted to Louisbourg for, in 1903, it was noted that the Louisbourg-Gabarus road was so bad that it was almost impassable to horse and carriage traffic.²⁰ In 1904, the town of Glace Bay was experimenting with "bitulithic" pavement but that was sufficiently rare in the province that a committee from the Truro town council came to review its success.²¹

Added to the problem of mud there was the problem caused by the presence of stables and cesspools. At a June 1903 Council meeting there were complaints that the cesspools from two places on Aberdeen Street were overflowing into the street. On Kent Street the runoff from a stable, on rainy days, was not only a sanitary problem for the street but one that was offensive to the nose as well.²²

Then there were structural problems. Captain Philip Townsend complained that the embankment in front of his house, on the hill at the corner of Huntington and Main, was falling away because the cutting for the street was too close to his property.²³ And the Council moved to place a protective wall around the property of Martha Mitchell on Warren Street because of the damage done to her property when the street was widened.²⁴

Lastly, there was the question of dealing with the municipal roads crews. D. J. Graham, the Superintendent of Streets, was looking for a raise in pay in June 1904. He wanted to be paid $2.00 a day instead of $1.50. The Council voted to raise his wage to $1.75 per day but left that of the men working on the streets at $1.25.²⁵