A century ago, river wharves were a lifeline for residents. Now they're getting a facelift

The river wharf has been a constant in Sharon Cunningham's life for as long as she can remember.

She swims off her local wharf daily in the summer months, near her home in Hatfield Point. And growing up, she spent a lot of nights on the wharf, too — even if her mother didn't always approve.

"I was the girl whose mother said, 'you must not go down to the wharf this evening!'" she said.

"It was a time of parties, youth. It was a good time. And that was part of my memories of wharves. And of course, swimming off them. I live near a wharf. And daily, I swim off that wharf."

Those ties to the wharf are a good fit for her current job as president of the St. John River Society. She and her fellow volunteers are the stewards of 13 public wharves — all of which are getting major repairs this summer.

The work is happening thanks to a $970,000 grant from the Canada Community-Building Fund. The society applied for the funds and received them in the fall of 2022. But because of last summer's heavy rainfall and high water levels, the repair work is happening now.

Cunningham says if the wharves were left as is, it would only be a matter of time before they were lost forever.

"We would not be standing on this wharf. And up and down this river, there were 34 wharves that were still viable in 1990. There were probably 50 in 1890. So, there's been a loss already.… This is what we've got left."

It was May 20, 1816, when the first steamboat, the General Smyth, plied its way up the St. John River, from Saint John to Fredericton. It was the fourth steamboat to ever operate in North America.

For the next 130 years, those steamboats fuelled the need for wharves along the St. John River.

They would soon become crucial access points, says George Lacey, the Queenstown Wharf steward with the St. John River Society.

The wharves were "mainly for local people so they could have some place to get public access to the water," he said. "I mean, not everyone owns land on the water around here."

Farmers would ship their produce through the wharves. And lumber was carried by boat, too.

"The railroad didn't go through until around the end of the First World War. So, everything had to be shipped by boat. That was the main source of transportation, this wharf here."