Ghosts of New Jerusalem

A guy who is a sucker for ghost towns is especially taken by a community that has entirely disappeared but for the war memorial commemorating those of its sons who went off to do their duty to ‘King and Empire’ in the Great War of 1914-18. Sons who never returned home.  New Jerusalem, New Brunswick, is certifiably a ghost town. Not a single person lives there anymore. Once upon a time New Jerusalem featured two churches, a schoolhouse, community hall and several dozen houses.  They are all gone. All that remains of New Jerusalem are the cemeteries harbouring the remains of those who lived and died there—and the community cenotaph.

One does not get to visit New Jerusalem without some effort. The village is one of sixteen communities scattered on either side of the Sunbury-Queens county line that were expropriated in the early-mid 1950s to establish Canadian Forces Base Gagetown, one of the biggest military bases in the Commonwealth. I contacted the base commander’s office, offered an account of my interest in war memorials and asked whether Gagetown might let me see the ghost town cenotaph. The army said Yes. Yes not only to myself and Jan but to friends Garth and Carole too.

At 0900 hours Wednesday our quartet arrived at Gagetown Building K69, Range Control, signed the necessary waivers and listened carefully to a short briefing on all the items—shells, rockets, ammunition, smoke bombs et al—that we might conceivably come across and must absolutely, positively not touch. None of us needed to be told twice. Despite the nuisance the military people couldn’t have been more accommodating in allowing us to visit New Jerusalem. We were even provided a soldier escort—congenial Warrant Officer Jamie Beaver, a fellow Cape Bretoner—to lead us where we needed to go.

The Gagetown base is huge—roughly 60 km north to south, 40 east to west—and it required a forty-minute drive from Building K69 to reach New Jerusalem. Driving through the rolling landscape toward the old community, roots of the Appalachian Mountains impressively conspicuous on the near horizon, it was easy to imagine that losing their homes and communities would have been very hard on those who loved the place they called home.

The New Jerusalem monument sits on a height of land commanding a long view in every direction. The stone cairn lists the names of seven men—two from the close-by community of Armstrongs Corner, three from Clones, two from Olinville—fated never to return to their Lower Saint John River Valley community when they went off to war in 1915-16.

The Olinville soldiers were brothers: McCutcheons. Charles Ransford McCutcheon was a 27-year-old fireman/mechanic when he enlisted at Calgary in October 1915. His younger brother by four years, Ernest Ludlow McCutcheon, a lumberman, was 23 when he enlisted at Saint John in early January 1916.

The older brother, Charles, was the first to bereave his mother and father back in Olinville, Isabella and William. On the night of June 22, 1916, he was struck by a shrapnel burst from an enemy shell and died in the wee small hours of the following morning. Some 551 Canadians—including Charles McCutcheon of Olinville—are among more than two thousand soldiers who lie for evermore in Railway Dugouts Burial Ground, just two kilometres southeast of Ypres, Belgium.

An authentic war hero, younger brother Ernest fought in most or all the iconic Canadian battle of later 1916 and 1917—Ypres, the Somme, Vimy, Passchendaele—and was awarded a Military Medal for gallantry, an award he did not live long enough to receive. A casualty of enemy poison gas in late May 1918, he was hospitalized in England. Ernest died October 11, 1918, a month before the Armistice. His ‘final resting place’ is a soldier’s grave in Brookwood Military Cemetery, Surrey. Among the more than 5,700 soldiers buried at Brookwood, Charles is one of 2,729 Canadians.

New Jerusalem is redolent of ghosts: the ghosts of those who lie in the cemetery just a stone’s throw from the cenotaph, those whose hearts must have been broken to lose their beloved communities in the 1950s, and those like the McCutcheon brothers who lie under a battlefield stone marker an ocean away from Olinville, Armstrongs  Corner and New Jerusalem.