The first ever provincial park in New Brunswick was not, as one might expect, a spiffy new centre designed to attract tourists (and their money) from far and wide. Instead, it was a fire containment strategy masquerading as a highway pitstop. It was also built without the government’s knowledge.
It was called Glenwood, and it was on the Stuart Highway, in Restigouche County, 30 miles west of Campbellton.
It had been a long and confusing road to get there.
Tourism in New Brunswick has historically been more of a hobby than a serious business — literally. There were two golden ages of tourism before Glenwood, and both had happened largely because an energetic young man took on the project as an eccentric personal hobby.
In the 1890s, a reporter at the Legislature named Frank Risteen toured New England in his spare time, advertising New Brunswick as a paradise for hunters and fishers. All he asked was that New Brunswick’s Legislature reimburse him for the cost of the brochures he wrote and had printed. MLAs refused. He continued anyway, until he got tuberculosis.
In the 1920s, Doug Black, editor of Fredericton’s Daily Gleaner, launched a one-man letter-writing campaign to American celebrities to get them to do road trips in New Brunswick. This, in turn, publicised the province to other tourists. He was so effective that when the Great Depression kicked in, ordinary New Brunswickers comforted themselves that Doug Black would save the province, until he had a heart attack.
By 1928, the Saint John Evening Times Globe noted that Ontario and British Columbia were opening provincial parks and wondered: “May not the Government of New Brunswick be interested in providing a provincial park on the coast line, as an attraction for tourists and as an additional place for recreation for our own people?”
A consensus quickly formed around Musquash — a beautiful estuary rich with birds — though the Telegraph-Journalcouldn’t help observing that Musquash was already pretty much a provincial park for poachers, given the volume of illegal fishing going on there.
But, for reasons that are not entirely clear (cost, probably; it’s almost always cost), Saint Johners came down hard against the proposed Musquash Provincial Park. It became the main issue in a municipal election, and the pro-park candidates were resoundingly defeated.
(Environmentalists would probably argue this was for the best. The original plan involved damming the estuary to create a massive artificial fishing pool. Today, by contrast, Musquash is a nationally protected marine area.)
Soon after, a provincial park was built up in Restigouche County. The thing was, nobody knew it was a provincial park.
Arnold Mann was the person behind it. He was an “Innovator.” That was his actual job title, which, admittedly, is a bit unusual since he mainly seemed to work as a fire warden.
It’s not entirely clear whether the province knew he was building a provincial park. He didn’t seem to know he was building one, either.
“It was more of a hobby, I call it,” Mann later told the Telegraph-Journal.
Glenwood Springs was a lovely little bubbling natural spring surrounded by a beautiful forest. It had long been a popular roadside stop for drivers to rest.
Or, at least, that was what everyone later said to explain the unusual choice of a location for the province’s first provincial park. The real reason was less picturesque.
Route 17 climbed the steep Stuart Mountain, only 35 kilometres outside of Campbellton. The road was so poor that cars tended to overheat climbing the hill. They would pull off the road to let their cars cool down.
When they stopped there, the tourists tended to start a little fire to boil some tea. Or they’d smoke a cigarette. Or they’d do something else fire-related. Inevitably, their fires would get out of control.
The job of Arnold Mann and four local wardens — Bill Coupland, Rubin Thomas, Fraser Nichol and Cliff Wyers — became chasing around tourists putting out fires. They started building stuff at Glenwood Springs to create a nice area to lure tourists to a single location so that they’d stop lighting fires all over the place!
In 1985, while celebrating the 50th anniversary of Glenwood Provincial Park, Tourism Minister Omer Léger was perfectly frank about the Mann and company’s real goals: “the idea was to direct travellers to a specific location where their campfires could be contained in stone fireplaces and where supervision was readily at hand.” (Mann really threw ice on that 50th anniversary ceremony when he pointed out they’d actually built the park in 1934, meaning that it was actually its 51st anniversary.)
Arnold Mann, however, was a bit more blunt about his motivations for building Glenwood: “Rather than have the boys running around in the woods looking for fires and things, we just kept them around the park. When there was a fire, or anything, we were already here. … We started with two wooden canopies, and we just had to keep building. … It was a great place for the tourists to stop.”
Mann, however, felt that it was important that Glenwood also “serve as a social gathering point for local people.” A park, in other words, for us, too.
The idea of the Glenwood-style parks exploded after the Second World War, and by the end of the 1950s, there were 54 provincial parks — though admittedly most of those were small roadside campsites that modern New Brunswickers might not recognise as what they’d consider a provincial park.
In the 1960s, the provincial park system pivoted into a more modern park system of beaches, golf courses and ski hills. The Acadie-Nouvelle wrote on the park system’s 50th anniversary in 1985 that there were then 58 provincial parks that attracted 2.5 million visitors a year, visiting 2,500 campsites, 2,300 picnic sites, and 30 beaches.
Today, there are far fewer provincial parks, and Glenwood itself is long gone. But the important thing to know is that New Brunswick provincial parks were never founded on hospitality, but as a way to get people to stop lighting fires all over the place!
