Florenceville, New Brunswick
Encyclopedia
Florenceville-Bristol (2006 population: 1,539) is a Canadian town situated in the Northwest part of New Brunswick in the St. John River Valley. The town is located on the banks of the Saint John River, in Carleton County
Carleton County, New Brunswick
Carleton County is located in west-central New Brunswick, Canada.The county is located in western New Brunswick, it borders on the west, the State of Maine; on the south, York County; on the north, Victoria County and is bisected by the Saint John River. Potato farming is a major industry...
in the Canadian
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
province of New Brunswick
New Brunswick
New Brunswick is one of Canada's three Maritime provinces and is the only province in the federation that is constitutionally bilingual . The provincial capital is Fredericton and Saint John is the most populous city. Greater Moncton is the largest Census Metropolitan Area...
.
The Town of Florenceville-Bristol is New Brunswick's newest town, amalgamating July 1, 2008. The new town has 1,539 residents as of 2006 and consists of the two former villages of Florenceville and Bristol.http://telegraphjournal.canadaeast.com/rss/article/246294
Florenceville-Bristol is home to the corporate headquarters for McCain Foods, the largest producer of French fries
French fries
French fries , chips, fries, or French-fried potatoes are strips of deep-fried potato. North Americans tend to refer to any pieces of deep-fried potatoes as fries or French fries, while in the United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand, long, thinly cut slices of deep-fried potatoes are...
in the world. McCain also operate the Florenceville Airport
Florenceville Airport
Florenceville Airport , is a private airfield located southwest of Florenceville, New Brunswick, Canada alongside the St. John River.The airport is classified as an airport of entry by NAV CANADA and is staffed by the Canada Border Services Agency. CBSA officers at this airport currently can...
, with a single paved runway located amid agricultural fields on the west side of the river.
It also has a free public art gallery
Art gallery
An art gallery or art museum is a building or space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art.Museums can be public or private, but what distinguishes a museum is the ownership of a collection...
. The Andrew and Laura McCain Gallery is a non-profit, community-supported gallery that shows about nine exhibitions a year of everything from exhibitions on loan from the National Gallery of Canada
National Gallery of Canada
The National Gallery of Canada , located in the capital city Ottawa, Ontario, is one of Canada's premier art galleries.The Gallery is now housed in a glass and granite building on Sussex Drive with a notable view of the Canadian Parliament buildings on Parliament Hill. The acclaimed structure was...
to the work of local school children.
Florenceville-Bristol is also home to the New Brunswick Potato Museum (Potato World) and Shogomoc Historical Railway Site. The Shogomoc Historical Railway Site showcases a restored CPR train station and three CPR cars and is home to FRESH "fine dining". Hunter Brothers Farm Market and Corn Maze.
Florenceville-Bristol is also home to H.J. Crabbe & Sons Lumber Mill. This long-running family business specializes in its quality softwood lumber made mainly from Balsam Fir and White Spruce. The company has also recently built a new mill in the town to produce wood stove pellets in order to use more of what would be scrap material to help cut down on waste. The company is also one of the largest landowners in the province, next to Irving and Frasier.
The town celebrates lots of festivals throughout the year; Festival of Flavour, which takes place August and showcases a variety of wine related events, Canada Day-July, Snow Blast- February, Haunted Train October, Buttermilk Creek Fall Festival-September and more.
Throughout the summer season, July to September, the town is host to an outdoor summer market, every Thursday from 10-2 pm at the Riverside Park. The outdoor summer market features food, produce, craft, woodworking, flower, baked goods, local meat and jewelry vendors. Each week showcases a different musical performance from local entertainers.
Also located just outside of the town limits is Noah's Ark, a 2/3-scale model of the Biblical Ark that Noah built as described in the Old Testament. It is used for housing of Burnham Road Ministries office and their student dorms for a privately own Bible school, The School of The Spirit. The sight of a 300-foot boat in the middle of potato fields and in the sight of Bristol and Oakland Mountain is cause for a quick visit for guests to the area.
History
Florenceville was originally known as Buttermilk Creek. In 1855 it was renamed Florenceville to honour Florence NightingaleFlorence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale OM, RRC was a celebrated English nurse, writer and statistician. She came to prominence for her pioneering work in nursing during the Crimean War, where she tended to wounded soldiers. She was dubbed "The Lady with the Lamp" after her habit of making rounds at night...
, the famous Crimean War
Crimean War
The Crimean War was a conflict fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the French Empire, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia. The war was part of a long-running contest between the major European powers for influence over territories of the declining...
nurse. Florenceville was on the west side of the Saint John River and there the first post office and commercial section of the village was situated. In later years East Florenceville became the commercial centre with five grocery stores and several other small businesses. There is a small mall along with several convenient stores.
Both villages had schools offering grades 1 through 12 until 1956 when the Florenceville Regional High School was opened accommodating grades 7 through 12. The original schools became the elementary schools. Eventually these were replaced by an elementary school on the east side of the river. The Regional High School became a middle school when Carleton North High School was built in Bristol, NB. It was later decided that starting in the year 2000 the middle school students would not begin high school until grade 9.
The former village of Bristol is located on the St. John River, in Carleton County, New Brunswick, Canada, approximately 5 kilometres north of Florenceville.
Present-day Bristol was the site of a battle between Micmac and Maliseet peoples. The area was originally named Shiktehawk, from the Maliseet for "where he killed him". The name was changed when the New Brunswick Railway was constructed and railway officials were unable to pronounce the name correctly. Bristol is located where the Big Shiktehawk and Little Shiktehawk Streams empty into the Saint John River. This was an important stopping point for Native peoples as it was the start of the cross province route. They would canoe up the Big Shiktehawk Stream to Divide where they would portage a short distance to the Miramichi River and make their way to the eastern coast of New Brunswick. A couple archeological digs have been done in the past on the flat and many artifacts have been found.
Bristol is the home of Carleton North High School
Carleton North High School
Carleton North High School is a high school located at the end of School Street in Florenceville-Bristol, New Brunswick, Canada. Carleton North has around 675 students, and was opened for the first time in the 1977-1978 school year...
as well as Bristol Elementary School.
Bristol has a small downtown made up of mostly locally owned businesses. There is a hardware store, a liquor store, an automotive supply store, a convenience store, a post office, and lawyers offices.
Bristol is also home to several churches of different denominations, H.J. Crabbe & Sons lumber mill, several summer camps, a series of beautiful wooded walking trails and two community parks.
In 2008 much of Bristol was flooded along the Saint John River. The flood plain of north and south mouths of the Big Shiktehawk Stream was completely flooded, cover that section of Hwy 105. Also in the central part of Bristol Hwy 105 was flooded between Brennen's and Village Green.
Physical geography
Florenceville-Bristol lies within the Appalachian Mountain Range. The town sits in the Saint John River Valley. On each side of the town lie rolling mountains peaking at 300–400 metres. The borough of Florenceville lies on a flat that has extremely rich soil due to past volcanic activity before the last ice age. The borough of Bristol also lies on a flat, but much lower to the river and lower parts of the borough floods during the spring.Geology
The bedrock underlying Florenceville-Bristol at its oldest is part of the White Head Formation consisting of limestone and calcareous shales of Late OrdovicianOrdovician
The Ordovician is a geologic period and system, the second of six of the Paleozoic Era, and covers the time between 488.3±1.7 to 443.7±1.5 million years ago . It follows the Cambrian Period and is followed by the Silurian Period...
to Early Silurian
Silurian
The Silurian is a geologic period and system that extends from the end of the Ordovician Period, about 443.7 ± 1.5 Mya , to the beginning of the Devonian Period, about 416.0 ± 2.8 Mya . As with other geologic periods, the rock beds that define the period's start and end are well identified, but the...
in age. Later in history more sedimentary rocks were deposited forming the Smyrna Mills Formation during the Silurian, consisting of shales, limestones, and conglomerates. The range of mountains from North to South along the Eastern side of the Saint John River
Saint John River
The Saint John River is a river, approximately long, located principally in the Canadian province of New Brunswick but also in, and arising from the province of Quebec and the U.S. state of Maine. It forms part of the Canada – United States border in two different places along its length...
known as Carr Mountain, The Pinnacle, and Oakland Mountain (N to S) are also part of the Smyrna Mills Formation and consist of mafic volcanic flows (basalt
Basalt
Basalt is a common extrusive volcanic rock. It is usually grey to black and fine-grained due to rapid cooling of lava at the surface of a planet. It may be porphyritic containing larger crystals in a fine matrix, or vesicular, or frothy scoria. Unweathered basalt is black or grey...
) and tuff
Tuff
Tuff is a type of rock consisting of consolidated volcanic ash ejected from vents during a volcanic eruption. Tuff is sometimes called tufa, particularly when used as construction material, although tufa also refers to a quite different rock. Rock that contains greater than 50% tuff is considered...
. Within these mountains there are also two gabbro
Gabbro
Gabbro refers to a large group of dark, coarse-grained, intrusive mafic igneous rocks chemically equivalent to basalt. The rocks are plutonic, formed when molten magma is trapped beneath the Earth's surface and cools into a crystalline mass....
tubes that are Early Devonian
Devonian
The Devonian is a geologic period and system of the Paleozoic Era spanning from the end of the Silurian Period, about 416.0 ± 2.8 Mya , to the beginning of the Carboniferous Period, about 359.2 ± 2.5 Mya...
in age. These tubes probably were the magma feeding tubes for volcanic flow that would have once overlain the existing rock, but have since been eroded.
Florenceville-Bristol are also extensively terraced with sands and gravels from both the workings of the Saint John River and its tributaries and also from the existence of a huge post-glacial lake that existed in the area for some time after the last Ice Age. In the areas that the bedrock is not covered by this aggregate material, the bedrock is covered by a thin veneer of glacial till.
There is also an extensive fault trending through Florenceville-Bristol from NE to SW which the Saint John River follows for a short distance through the town, causing its seemingly odd bend in flow in the local area.
Climate
The town gets a fair amount of precipitationPrecipitation (meteorology)
In meteorology, precipitation In meteorology, precipitation In meteorology, precipitation (also known as one of the classes of hydrometeors, which are atmospheric water phenomena is any product of the condensation of atmospheric water vapor that falls under gravity. The main forms of precipitation...
, although major paralyzing snow
Snow
Snow is a form of precipitation within the Earth's atmosphere in the form of crystalline water ice, consisting of a multitude of snowflakes that fall from clouds. Since snow is composed of small ice particles, it is a granular material. It has an open and therefore soft structure, unless packed by...
and rain
Rain
Rain is liquid precipitation, as opposed to non-liquid kinds of precipitation such as snow, hail and sleet. Rain requires the presence of a thick layer of the atmosphere to have temperatures above the melting point of water near and above the Earth's surface...
storms such as blizzard
Blizzard
A blizzard is a severe snowstorm characterized by strong winds. By definition, the difference between blizzard and a snowstorm is the strength of the wind. To be a blizzard, a snow storm must have winds in excess of with blowing or drifting snow which reduces visibility to 400 meters or ¼ mile or...
s and hurricanes are uncommon but do happen on occasion. On average, Florenceville receives approximately 1100 mm of precipitation per year. Snowfall is common between late November and early April, and snow usually stays on the ground beginning in December. Flood
Flood
A flood is an overflow of an expanse of water that submerges land. The EU Floods directive defines a flood as a temporary covering by water of land not normally covered by water...
ing occurs during the spring of most years and affects the low lying areas of Florenceville-Bristol.