The New Brunswick Industry Gallery
Sponsored by the Irvings. Work, Innovation & Exchange 1870 - 1950
This gallery takes you on a voyage down a river past a lumber camp, river drive, farmland and a river boat dock to a coastal fishing wharf, lumber mill, woodworking factory to an urban dock. Here is the point of exchange where lumber, fish and agricultural produce from the New Brunswick hinterland and coastal areas meet the town or city wharf. The ploughs, axes and carpet sweepers from the town and city factories await shipment upriver and along the coasts aboard steamers to consumers on the farms, lumber camps and fishing villages. In the background, portending change, is the railway which provides increasing competition to the riverboats and coastal steamers for freight traffic in the late 19th and 20th centuries. It also permits the establishment of portable sawmills nearer the source of supply and rail transport directly from the forest thus cutting into the traditional river drive. Opposite the urban dock, the fish canning operation along New Brunswick's eastern coast is already shipping by rail.
Whether a captain of industry, a retail clerk, a lumberman, a factory worker or an inventor in a workshop, this gallery honours the effort and determination of all those who contributed in making New Brunswick a safe and comfortable province in which to live.