The Cleasby Property

by Charles D. Grant
1980

The house owned by the Grant family and named “Cleasby” by one of it’s former owners is characteristic of the picturesque style of the mid -ninteenth century. It is a frame house built on stone wall foundations with clapboard siding painted white and steeply-pitched main roof containing two dormer windows in front and modest gingerbread trim along the eaves. The house and the land, situated on the east side of Rothesay Road, face northwest overlooking Kennebecasis Bay. A one-and-a-half storey ‘ell’ containing the kitchen, pantry and storerooms extends from the rear of the house.

The property on which the house stands was part of the Crown grant of 1824 to John Hennigar, a Loyalist, who came from New York in the 1790’s. During the next 30 years the lot was mortgaged and sold several times until the 1850’s when William Davidson began selling portions of it. The present property took shape in 1855 when Davidson, who had already built a mill on what is now called Taylor’s Brook, sold 24 acres to John Munroe, a carpenter from Saint John, for 240 pounds. He is assumed to have built the house shortly afterwards.

John J. Munroe is listed as a Freeman of Saint John in 1837 and by 1866 had established a business on Princess Street for the manufacture of trunks and valises. One of his sons, John A. Munroe, was an architect who worked on the plans of several buildings in Saint John including the Wiggins Asylum and is believed to have carved a wooden lion which stood on a rock outside the dining room at least until the end of the century. John A. Munroe has a more startling and notorious claim to fame in that in 1869 he was sentenced to hang for the murder of Miss Sarah Vail and her babe Ella May in the famous Black River Road Tragedy. During the trial of John A. Munroe his father gave the testimony concerning the manufacture of a trunk which was an item of evidence in the case. The story goes that since among John A. Munroe’s designs was a gallows that jerked the man up rather tan allowing him to drop to his death, it was only appropriate that he should be hung by his own device! Afterwards it was noticed that the houses he had built were often decorated with wood carved to resemble rope.

Between 1869 and 1936 the house changed hands ten times and was also rented by several people. In 1869 John J. Munroe sold it to John Livingstone, a prominent journalist of new Brunswick who at that time was owner and editor of the Morning Telegraph and the Journal. Two years later Livingstone sold it to Egerton R. Burpee who was a civil engineer responsible for the westward extension of the European and North American Railway from Saint John to Bangor. After two years Burpee sold it to General Darius B. Warner who at the time was U.S Consul in Saint John. About 35 years later General Warner took a small boy fishing near Anagance; Macgregor Grant, who recalled that the General had lost an arm in the American Civil War and fished with a Spring-loaded-reel The Warners lived in the house for three years then in 1876 sold it to John Morris Robinson who was manager of the Bank of Nova Scotia. The Robinsons lived in the house for more then 20 years and called is “Cleasby” after the village in England from where their family originally came. In the angle of the ‘ell’ they built a large dinging room with a couple of additional rooms upstairs and added two fireplaces to the four already in the house.

A photograph of Rothesay taken in the 1890’s from the hill behind Cleasby shows the ‘ell’ (called the steep stair house and torn down in 1936), a large barn with a cupola (where the black barn is now) and several smaller outbuildings, fenced gardens and paddocks and the field stone wall (now overgrown by trees) separating the property from neighbouring one (now owned by W.J. Simon). Another photograph from the same era shows the enclosed verandah which ran around the house three sides of the house, the dining room, the blind tower (removed in 1950) on top of the front porch and the lion on the granite boulder outside. In 1898 the Robinsons sold Cleasby to Jane Vassie, widow of a Saint John dry goods merchant, who sold it two years later to Mary O’Day wife of a New York businessman. From 1911 to 1920 Walter Allison of Saint John’s beloved Manchester Robertson Allison department store lived in the house. At that time the Allisons also owned the adjacent land on the western side and, after building a new house on the property to Emily E. Cornell. Mr. Cornell, who worked with the Mackay Lumber Company and had oak floors laid in the front living rooms and built two fireplaces of huge sandstone blocks. When the Grants bought the house they dismantled the stone fireplaces and used the blocks as bases for the front and verandah steps and for retaining walls around the compost heap.

In 1928 John D. Purdy bought the house from the Cornells for his parents who, in fact, never moved from Saint John. The house was rented during the late 20’s and early 30’s. The tenants included a Mr.Stackhouse, Col. Reginald Brooks who was second in command under Major General Anderson of this military district, Brigadier Constantine who succeeded Anderson an DOC, the Frank Brennans and the T.C McNabs. About Stackhouse little is known except that judging from the dozens of five-gallon tins each bearing the imprint of hand and the label “Hand Brank” found in the attic, he ran a flourishing business during prohibition.

In 1936 Macgregor Grant brought Cleasby from John D. Purdy III who was by then living in Chicago. Mrs. Grant recalled that on moving day she and a neighbour loaded the back of her car with the geraniums for the drive out of Rothesay. On the way out of Saint John they managed to get into the middle of a funeral procession; the cars in front turned into Fernhill Cemetery but the rear of the cortege carried straight on following the car with the flowers.

Kinghurst Dairy cut the hay on the front and back fields until the early 1950’s. Since then the front field has grown into a thicket of linden trees while meadowsweet, rasberries and wildflowers have steadily encroached on the back field. Inside the house the most notable change has been the removal of the wall between the two living rooms, thereby making the room nearly forty feet long with windows on three sides. ON Christmas night this room is full the setting of a cheerful evening of musical chairs, charades, the Virginia Reel and the Eightstone Reel. In 1980 Cleasby was about 125 years old and the Grant family has lived in it for 44 years, by far the longest of any of it’s owners.