By Devonna Edwards, Columnist
Jones Hill: The hill, located in Fairview on Dutch Village Road, today known as Joseph Howe Drive, was quite large and was owned by the Jones family. The Jones owned extensive property in the area between Bayers Road and Joseph Howe Drive, near the Fairview Overpass. In the Hopkins City map for 1878, it shows that the hill bordered Standford’s Pond also known as Blockhouse Pond, today the pond is filled in and the railway tracks on Joseph Howe Drive (former Dutch Village Road) are built there. On the other side of the hill was an area which later became known as Howe Avenue, today renamed Joseph Howe Drive. Joseph and Catherine (Raines) Jones lived at the top of the hill in a house that had a very long narrow dirt driveway leading down to Dutch Village Road. At the bottom of the hill near Howe Avenue and leading towards the back of the hill once ran a brook called Jones Brook, later it was filled in and a single railway track was built. The track crossed over Howe Avenue to circle the back of the hill and led into Fairview Cove Roundhouse, today the track has been removed and a new building called the Toronto Dominion Bank (TD) stands on the site.
Donnie Poole, a long- time resident of Fairview, told me he remembered Catherine Jones well. He said that after her husband died at a young age, she cooked meals for the railway men a couple of times a day and employees of the railway would come to her house to be fed. Donnie, as a young lad, delivered groceries to her from the Allen O’Neil store.
In the Halifax Directory for 1896-97, it listed Joseph Jones as living in the last house on the east side of Dutch Village Road and in 1902-03 he was still living there and employed at the Sugar Refinery. The last time he was listed in the Directory was 1912 and by 1914-15 his wife Catherine Jones was noted as the widow of Joseph Jones. In 1949 Catherine was still living at 405 Dutch Village Road (last house before the railway. In the 1950s a fire burnt Catherine Jones house down and I can remember seeing the flames shooting up into the dark sky from my house on McFatridge Road.
The side of Jones Hill facing the railway tracks was a great place for the local kids to pick blueberries, which grew there in abundance. While picking berries I was always on the look-out for wild cats (bobcats) known to roam the area at that time. One day I was sitting on an empty foundation and unbeknown to me I put my foot in an ant’s nest, my white sock crawling with hundreds of little ants, horrid memory!
The hill was cut down and flattened and the dirt from the hill was removed and used to build Howe Avenue.
At one time, a couple members of the Jones family were buried on their farmland but later the graves were moved to St. John’s Cemetery. Wayne Kelly remembered his friend Billy Jones lived on the corner of Scot Street and Howe Avenue (Joseph Howe Drive) in the late 1950s and he had a barn next to his house. The Jones family kept animals on the property, the most popular animal there was a donkey. Bill took the donkey all around Fairview offering rides to the children for the price of 25 cents.
That section of Joseph Howe Drive (Howe Avenue) was once no bigger than a cow path, but later a road was built and then paved in 1958. The road is extremely busy today and is one of the main arteries leading to and from the City of Halifax.
Maritime Telegraph and Telephone Company built their establishment in 1957 on the site of another farmhouse, belonging to one of the Jones family and today a supermarket called Superstore occupies that space. Another business called Northern Electric was also built on the Jones’ property and now the Superstore gas bar occupies that site, near the road. At the present time there are several businesses standing on the former Jones Hill site.
Maritime Telegraph and Telephone Company: In 1880 the first telephone office was established on Hollis Street in Halifax and by 1950 there were more than 33,000 telephones in the Halifax-Dartmouth area. At that time Halifax was known as a dial exchange, a pioneer in Canada of dial service, being the second City to have dial telephones in 1921.
Halifax’s location on the Atlantic seaboard, with its railway and shipping made the telephone an important aspect of communications, especially in Long Distance calls. The Halifax Long Distance Operator had direct connection to most Provincial points and out of Province with Saint John, Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Boston, New York and via these centres to any point in the world where telephone contact is possible. The demand for telephone service was greater than ever after the Second World War.
In 1910 the Nova Scotia Telephone Company in Halifax was re-incorporated as the Maritime Telegraph and Telephone Company Ltd. (MT&T). Prior to 1998 there were four telephone companies in Atlantic Canada: Maritime Telegraph and Telephone Company, Island Telecom, NB Tel, and New Tel Communications. In 1998 they merged to form Aliant, which later became Bell Aliant.
The MT&T building constructed in 1957, stood on the former Jones property for many years until it was demolished after the business was moved in 1977 to a new building called ‘The Maritime Centre’ on Barrington Street, at the bottom of Spring Garden Road.
Rumour has it that during the “Cold War” a large bomb shelter was built under the Maritime Telegraph and Telephone Co. building on Howe Avenue
