New Brunswick Historical Tidbits

The Leper Colony

By Mitch Biggar

In April of 1849 the House of Assembly established a three man Board of Health to deal with the outbreak of leprosy. The Board of Health agreed that the best course of action would be to segregate the infected persons. The Board then appropriated one thousand pounds to build a leper colony on Sheldrake Island.

Sheldrake Island is located thirteen kilometres below Chatham in the Miramichi river. The colony opened with eighteen people as residents. This leper colony did not last long as the conditions there were horrid. Many afflicted people escaped the island colony and eventually the buildings on the island wee burned down by the diseased people themselves.

A new colony was established in 1849 at Tracadie and this colony now contained thirty-one people This new colony was better then the first. The Tracadie colony was ran by parish priest Francois-Xavier and a French doctor named Charles-Marie LaBillois.

In 1868 the conditions at the Tracadie colony improved greatly with the arrival of seven nuns from the Religieuses Hospitallieres of Saint Joseph in Montreal. The Tracadie Leper Hospital was taken over by the federal government in 1879 and the conditions once again improved.

This page was designed by Irene Doyle September 1999