The next time you’re walking around uptown Saint John, don’t forget to look up. Hidden in obscure alleyways and side-streets are traces of centuries of history.
Ghost signs are the fading remains of hand-painted advertising murals popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Businesses would also frequently etch their names on the bricks themselves.
In New Brunswick, these relics are “not very common at all outside Saint John,” said art historian John Leroux, manager of collections and exhibitions at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton.
“It’s another reminder of how fascinating and precious architecture in Saint John is.”
Advertising murals and brick ads from the 19th and early 20th centuries are slowly fading away — but reveal stories from more than a century of history in this New Brunswick port city.
From Masonic mottos, to funeral businesses, to tobacco ads, here are 10 brick ads that tell the story of Canada’s oldest incorporated city.
1. Shamrock Plug Tobacco
Shamrock Tobacco was a major Canadian tobacco company headquartered in Quebec.
It’s immortalized in Saint John in a large colour mural at 44 Water St. and another at 166 Prince William, right beside a faded ad for “delicious, refreshing Coca-Cola.”
“Plug” tobacco isn’t popular these days. In the 19th and early 20th century, however, it was all the rage to bite or cut pieces off a compressed rectangles of tobacco leaves, which were chewed and spit out. “Navy plug,” originally produced for the U.S. navy, was made with heavily sweetened Burley tobacco, while “flat plug” was less sweet and made with Bright tobacco.
“So it tells you 100 years ago what was important to people: Coke and cigarettes,” Leroux said. ‘In some ways, some things haven’t changed quite so much.”
2. Dominion Rubber Company
Tucked high above the street in an alleyway between the Canada Revenue Agency, and offices at 87 Canterbury, is this large hand-painted ad for Dominion Rubber Company Ltd.
Dominion, founded in Montreal in 1854 by William Brown, Ashley Hibbard, and George Bourn, manufactured tires and other rubber goods
In the 1920s, Dominion opened a Saint John office in this three-storey brick warehouse, originally built for the D. F. Brown Paper Box and Paper Company in 1901, according to information from the City of Saint John’s community planning department.
Obscuring the first few letters of “Dominion” are the remnants of another, almost unreadable painted ad.
“The logo that’s coming through is probably the original paper box company,” Leroux said. The layered effect is known as a palimpsest:
3. Ames Holden McCready Footwear
Best spotted looking south from the corner of Princess and Canterbury streets, the words “Ames” and “boots” on the side of 93 Canterbury are vestiges of the Ames Holden McCready Footwear Company.
This type of mural was “designed for pedestrians,” Leroux said. “In a car, you wouldn’t really notice these things. You go by the buildings too fast.”
AHM, a leather merchant founded in the 1860s, became a major player in Canadian footwear by the late 19th century. Their Saint John office and warehouse, built in 1912, was located just down the street at 89 Canterbury.
In a 1919 newspaper ad in the St. John Standard, Ames Holden McCready called itself “Shoemaker to the Nation,” with offices in Montreal, Toronto, WInnipeg, Edmonton, Vancouver and Saint John. In 1920, it advertised itself in the Daily Telegraph and Sun as “carrying at all times “stocks, not only of leather shoes, but also of rubbers, white canvas, tennis and outing shoes and felt footwear.”
4. Jardine & Co.
The Jardine family built a grocery and wholesale empire in Saint John in the mid-nineteenth century — immortalized by their name etched in the bricks on the Water Street-facing side of 87 Prince William.
Jardine & Co. was founded by Robert Jardine, born in 1812 at Girvan, Ayrshire, Scotland, who moved to Saint John along with his brother Alexander in the early 1830s.
In the 1840s and 1850s, the Jardines supplied Saint John with goods from around the world. “Java coffee, Puerto Rican molasses, British seed, American tobacco, Peruvian fertilizer, Canadian flour, African cocoa, and Nova Scotian fish, as well as agricultural implements,” according to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. The grocery business operated until 1896.
Both Robert Jardine and Alexander Jardine are buried in Fernhill Cemetery, close by Craigie Lea — Alexander Jardine’s residence, which remains one of the oldest surviving homes in east Saint John. In addition to the black brickwork on Water Street, their names also live on in newly illuminated Jardine’s Alley, which runs between Prince William and Water streets.
5. Hayward and Warwick
Many Saint Johners will still recall shopping for china, glassware and gifts at Hayward and Warwick over the decades.
The business, founded in 1855, was named after founding brothers-in-law William Henry Hayward and William Warwick, whose first establishment burned in the Great Fire of 1877.
Hayward and Warwick rebuilt their crockery-making shop at 85 Princess St. in 1879, which remained a local name in china sets, lamps, ornaments and glassware until it closed in 2017.
The sign advertising china, glass and gifts is still visible from the steps of Trinity Church on Germain Street.
“Even though the business doesn’t exist, it is as much a part of the story of Saint John as a church, or a statue,” Leroux said.
It’s “the life of the city that made Saint John — and this is part of it.”
5. Townsend Company
Water Street has been a key location to Saint John’s marine history — part of which is captured in a hand-painted sign for Townsend Company Ltd (Maritime) at 110-112 Water St.
The sign is newer than most of the other hand-painted ads in Saint John. Townsend Company was a waterfront ship chandler that provided supplies and equipment for ships from 1970 until 2000. But the history of the building in the marine industry dates back much further.
110-112 Water St., now home to Steamers Lobster Co., was built in 1910 as a warehouse for Andrew “Beef” Malcolm, according to the City of Saint John’s Community Planning Department. Three generations of the Malcolm family — all with the name Andrew Malcolm — operated a wholesale business there until the late 1950’s.
The building is a designated provincial historic site for its role in the shipping and fishing industry.
6. M.N Powers
Just above the sign for the restaurant Decimal 81 at 79-81 Princess St. is a large brick bearing the name “M.N. Powers, 1877.”
Mark Needham Powers was “the first full-time undertaker in the City of Saint John,” according to the city’s planning department, and used this address as both his residence and his “warerooms.”
Powers was a pioneer in the funeral industry. He constructed one of the first glass hearses in New Brunswick, which could regularly be spotted going through the carriageway that led to the stables behind the shop.
After Powers died in 1892, his son and grandson operated the business until 1925.
7. The Masonic Temple
This brick sign on the side of 96 Germain St. isn’t an ad — it’s an admonition.
“Audi, vide, tace” is a Latin motto used in Freemasonry, which can be found on the coat of arms used by the United Grand Lodge of England.
The Masonic motto translates as “hear, see and hold your tongue”: a reminder to Freemasons not to reveal the secrets of the lodge.
Above it is a time-worn coat of arms with a lamb, a lion, and other Masonic symbols. The Grand Lodge of New Brunswick, founded in 1867, still operates at 96 Germain St.
9. Dearborn & Co.
These days, “people consider wealth a private thing,” Leroux said, but “back then, if you were extremely wealthy, your building was seen as an expression of wealth. It was also a gift to the city.”
High up on 93 Prince William St. is a brick ad for Dearborn and Company, a coffee roaster and spice dealer that also manufactured condiments ranging from baking powder to ketchup.
The Dearborn Building, like the Jardine Building down the street at 87 Prince William, had the advantage of having one side easily accessible from Saint John’s ice-free port and bustling Water Street, and the other on the major thoroughfare of Prince William Street.
The company was taken over by Canadian Mills and Specialties Ltd. in 1919.
10. A & I Isaacs
You need good eyesight to spot the faded word “cigar” on the side of 80 Princess St., one of several storefronts in the Port City once occupied by cigar manufacturers Abraham and Israel Isaacs.
The two brothers learned the cigar-making trade from their father while growing up overseas in London. According to a 1909 obituary published in The Jewish Times, “in 1878 Mr. Isaacs removed his family to Saint John, and began cigar manufacturing on Dock Street.”
“A year later, he was joined by his brother, Mr. Isaacs, and together they established the firm of A&I Isaacs … one of the oldest established and best-known firms in the Maritime provinces, ranking amongst the largest cigar manufacturers in Canada.”
The brothers helped found the Ahavith Achim (Brotherly Love) Synagogue, established in 1898 and forerunner of the present-day Shaarei Zedek Synagogue.
The faint lettering is a good reminder that eventually, most hand-painted ads will fade from the old bricks of Saint John.
“You lose the ad — but you also lose a visual and tactile part of the history,” Leroux said. “They tell us about what people did, what they consumed, what mattered to them.
“That’s part of the reason to save them — or at least to photo document them.”
