By Suzanne Rent
This item originally appeared as VIEWS in Morning File, April 17, 2024
Last week, Nova Scotia Archives shared on its Facebook page this photo of a map. The caption with the post reads: “Sketch: The place where the two Daughters of John Meagher were lost in the woods. Near Dartmouth, N.S. April 1842.”
Meagher’s two daughters were Jane Elizabeth and Margaret, who went missing after they went for a walk in woods in Dartmouth on April 11, 1842. Over the course of a week, thousands of people went searching for the girls, who were aged six and four, but the girls were lost and died from exposure.
At the Woodlawn Cemetery in Dartmouth, there is a headstone with the names of all of John and Jane Meagher’s children engraved on the front. John and Jane’s names are engraved on the side of the headstone. On top of a stone tabletop monument is a plaque honouring Jane Elizabeth and Margaret, who went by Maggie.
I heard a bit about the story of the young Jane Elizabeth and Maggie before, the Babes in the Wood of Dartmouth, but I didn’t know all the details. So, I went looking for more information.
Joanne Pepers, the executive director at the Dartmouth Heritage Museum who I interviewed in late January about the increase in funding the museum received from HRM, sent along a few items about the story of the Meagher girls.
Pepers made this video about the story in a YouTube segment called Curator’s Corner:
On the day Jane Elizabeth and Maggie went missing, John Meagher was in bed with the measles, while his wife, Jane, was taking care of their newborn. The eldest daughter, Martha, who was 11, was at home taking care of chores.
Jane Elizabeth and Maggie went for a walk in the woods to pick berries. When they didn’t return for supper, John sent a hired hand to go look for them.
John and neighbours eventually joined the search, but there was no sign of the girls. A couple inches of snow fell that first night they were missing.
A couple of days later, hundreds of people joined the search. The searchers found footprints, and a scrap of clothing.
After the Saturday newspaper published a story about the missing girls and the need for searchers, 3,000 people showed up in Dartmouth to help.
“What really got me after the story ends and the results in it was seeing the map afterwards,” Pepers said in her video. “Shortly after the tragedy, a map was created, and the map shows the route that the children probably took. And what struck me was the distance that they travelled. This is something that is well known now in search and rescue, people travel a lot further than we think that they might when they’re lost. You lose your bearings.”
That’s this map Nova Scotia Archives shared last week. The girls travelled about six kilometres through the woods.
Here’s a more current map of the same area.
The tabletop monument was put in place at the cemetery by Peter Currie. His dog, Rover, found the girls’ bodies on Huckleberry Hill, which is now known as Melancholy Mountain. Currie was given a reward for his part in the search for the girls, but used that money to pay for the monument.
John and Jane Meagher are also buried at the same gravesite as Jane Elizabeth and Margaret. So are the Meagher’s other two children, Martha and George.
Dartmouth historian J.P. Martin wrote about Jane Elizabeth and Margaret in a pamphlet from the museum collection that Pepers sent along to me. Robert H. Lindsay wrote a book about the Meagher girls called Melancholy Mountain: What happened in 1842?
Pepers also sent a poem about the tragedy from a collection that belonged to Dr. Lawlor of Dartmouth. Here are the last verses:
For, to describe that hill,
It far transcends my pen;
But a mighty concourse was gathered there
Of feeling hearted menAnd the bereaved father stood
And thanked them for their aid,
And he hoped that no such tragedy,
Would on this earth be made.A little monument was built
To mark the direful spot
Where those helpless little children,
Did meet their destined lot.
That spot is now a popular hiking spot. You can find photos of the cairn here. Pepers said a marble statue of the girls is also in storage at the museum.
The Nova Scotia Archives has in its Helen Creighton collection several audio recordings of people in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick singing a song called “Babes in the Woods.” You can listen to those here.
