Who was Charles J. Campbell?
- Jocelyn
- 19 hours ago
- 7 min read
‘Hello Charlie’ I say out loud as I walk past the likeness of Charles J Campbell above the door of the Old Post Office.
I presume this is what Charlie intended.
That more than 120 years after he took his final breath, his presence is still addressed, he is still greeted, still remembered by the people of Baddeck. Because, obviously, if you have your face carved in stone on a public building, on the Main Street, over the main door - you do not want to be forgotten.
There must be more to the man than the stone-faced Scotsman presented here for all to see.
Who was Charles James Campbell?
My introduction to him was through a letter Mabel Bell wrote in 1894, describing him unflattering as “that old reprobate that lives in the large square house on the hill opposite the post office behind the hawthorn and lilac hedge”.
By then, Campbell was a rich old man, one who had amassed great wealth through shipbuilding, coal mining, land holdings and politicking. His reputation as a rogue who made cold, calculating, decisions preceded him.
But he was not at all what she expected.
“I found him so charming, so courtly in an old-fashioned way that I took a great fancy to him… Mr. McCurdy says everyone feels the same way, though he is violent when under the influence of liquor that he has driven his whole family from him.”
He was known variously as a successful businessman, a resilient politician, an advocate for the wealthy, the merchant, and the property owner. He used his powerful connections to amass land holdings, businesses, money and power. His name appears on over 800 land documents in Victoria County between 1851 and 1899. He was tenacious – running 12 times for political office. He lost four elections and won eight elections – three of which were later overturned due to voting irregularities.
He not only owned giant swaths of land in Baddeck, but also acreages in Big Baddeck, Middle River, Iona, Grand Narrows, North River, Bras d’Or and Boisdale. He was influential and well connected. His brother-in-law was the sheriff (and occasional overseer of elections… more on that in a later post) and in later years his son was a judge in the probate court, where land titles could be easily snapped up amid family disputes.
His personal life though, contained violence and profound loss, including the early death of his father and the brutal murder of his mother by his step-father, when Charles was 20.
Charles James Campbell was born near the ruins of Duntulum Castle on the Isle of Skye, in the northern Highlands of Scotland on November 6, 1819, in the midst of a seismic upheaval known as the Highland Clearances. Charles was the seventh child born to John Campbell and Isabella McRae, who married on December 23, 1806.
His father was a ‘tacks man’ an Anglicized Gaelic word (from fear-taic) meaning a lease-holder. John Campbell was a farmer who leased a large acreage from wealthy landowners, kept a portion for himself to farm and raise cattle, and sub-let the rest to other farmers. A tacks man was basically a middle-man, an intermediary between the baronial owners and the tenant crofters with the authority to collect rents. This centuries-old system would be obliterated during the Highland Clearances (1750-1860), when farmers were burned out of their homes and pushed off the lands they had subsisted on by the wealthy landowners, to raise sheep – a more lucrative endeavour. It is estimated some 150,000 Scots left the Highlands as a result; many of them eventually settled in North America. On Cape Breton, the Highlanders increased the population from 2500 in 1801 to 55,000 by 1851.
When Charles was a toddler, his father sailed to a Barbados tea plantation for work, leaving behind his pregnant wife and a young family of six children. He never returned. He died of yellow fever before his youngest son Lachlin was born.
By the time Charles was 11 and Lachlin was 9, their mother Isabella had remarried, against her parent’s wishes. Donald, the groom was from the McDonald clan and the centuries old hostilities between the Campbells and McDonalds were still deeply felt.
Donald McDonald wanted to make a new start with his new bride in Cape Breton, where other Highlanders had settled. But her large family was a complication. He told his bride she could only take Charles and Lachlin, the two youngest. Charles and his brother Lachlin made the journey. The remaining five children, all still in their teens, stayed in Scotland with their grandparents.
The newlywed MacDonalds and the Campbell sons built a life on Kempt Road near River Inhabitants in Richmond County. Isabella had two more sons with McDonald, but their lives were not settled.
By 1834, Charles’s older brother 18-year-old Colin, had also left Scotland and come to Cape Breton. From Sydney, where he was a clerk in a cousin’s store, he wrote letters to River Inhabitants, encouraging 15-year-old Charles, offering typical parental advice to ‘keep himself clean and tidy, to read his bible and never go to bed without saying his prayers’. He also tells Charles he should have ‘a moleskin suit for work and a good blue suit for Sundays’ and offered to buy them for his little brother.
“So dear Charles, I hope you will improve every moment of your time to instruct yourself in all the branches of education. You must particularly try to improve your spelling for through you should be able to write a good hand, what will be the good of it until you can spell. Take your dictionary for every word short or long until you can remember them. Spelling is the chief of all writing.”
Charles, it seems was a quick learner and eager to please. In 1835, just a year later, Colin wrote: “It is with greatest satisfaction I perceive your improvements in writing and spelling and to convince you of it I will not only send you half a dozen quills but a hundred of them.”
In November 1840, Charles gets word that his mother has died at the hands of his step-father.
Donald McDonald had been drinking. The pair had been in a rowboat, with McDonald’s 15-year-old nephew, returning from Arichat. The nephew testified that as they neared home, Isabella and Donald began to argue about McDonald’s alcohol consumption. McDonald then swung an oar and struck Isabella in the head, hurtling her into the water with the force.
A report from the Cape Breton Advocate newspaper included the sordid details of Isabella and Donald McDonald’s marriage, and that it had been a violent one since the start.
“The union from the beginning had been unhappy and time had bred many a quarrel… She abstained from liquor, but he would take his glass,” the newspaper reported.
It was a little past 3:30pm on the second day of spring, Saturday March 21, in 1840 when Robert Elmsley first lands on Kidston Island and encounters Charles Campbell for the first time.
Elmsley, then a 17-year-old recent immigrant from Brechin Scotland, had just arrived in on Kidston’s Island to become a clerk at William Kidston’s store. The store, opened by James Duffus twenty years earlier, catered mostly to customers travelling through the Bras d’Or Lakes and small populations along the Baddeck River, Middle River and Boularderie. The area now known as Baddeck consisted of just the store on the island and a few buildings on the mainland. The main settlement then, was the area along the Baddeck River, specifically the stretch known today to as Big Farm Road, McCharles Cross and Dennison Road. In later years, this area will be called Big Baddeck, to differentiate it from its smaller and less populated cousin Little Baddeck. By the 1860’s Little Baddeck had outgrown its minor status and simply became Baddeck.
Robert Elmsley describes his early view from Kidston Island:
“ There being thick woods on the mainland from Graveyard Point (note: near the Lakeside Restaurant on the Inverary Inn property) to Hector Mclean’s log cabin (note: east of the Knox cemetery on the Bay Road) and only a cow path to Big Baddeck… The cow path customers waived a napkin opposite the store, and a wooden canoe would ferry then to and fro gratis.”
Elmsley and his travelling companion William Keynock had been hired to clerk in Kidston’s store. They walked on the ice from Sydney, and “found Charles J Campbell in charge of the store”. As head clerk, Campbell was also responsible for ferrying customers back and forth in the wooden canoe from the store to a landing place, located near the western point of Water Street, (note: the point where Twinning Street becomes Water Street).
Campbell was then 20. How long he had been working in Baddeck is unknown. But he built a strong clientele for Kidston, speaking his native Gaelic to the largely Scottish population.
That spring, Campbell leased land opposite the island, on the eastern point of Water Street (where the new boardwalk begins) from Kidston for one shilling and three pence per quarter – about $50 a year in today’s dollars. There he built his own store, competing directly with Kidston.
Next week, Charles launches a shipbuilding industry in Baddeck and runs for office.
Sources:
The Colonial Campbells: A Family History by Colin McDowell Campbell (1984) Rothamay Press.
Jim St. Clair wrote about the murder of Charles J Campbell’s mother in the Highland Village newsletter in June 2000. https://highlandvillage.novascotia.ca/sites/default/files/inline/images/anrubha_7-1.pdf
The Cape Breton Advocate, Dec 23, 1850 (pg. 139) contains a newspaper report about the coroners inquest into the death of Isabella McDonald. https://beatoninstitute.com/uploads/r/null/4/a/f/4aff5fedf79f3454ec56e89d9e3096ff05c07f1fe652ab841968d3b88ed7332c/1840-12-23_-_December_23__1840.pdf
Charles J Campbell’s biography in the Canadian Biographical Dictionary of Eminent & Self-Made Men Quebec & the Maritimes (1881) https://www.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.08546/438
Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tacksman.
More on Duntulum Castle here: https://castle-finders.co.uk/Scotland/duntulm%2520castle.html
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