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When Samuel Leonard Tilley left Gagetown, New Brunswick at the age of 13 for a career as a pharmacist, he was unaware that he would become New Brunswick’s most prominent Father of Confederation.
Tilley was born May 8, 1818 in a small bedroom off the main parlour of his parents’ house in the Village of Gagetown. The eldest of many brothers and sisters, Samuel left home as a young teenager to apprentice as a pharmacist in St. John, eventually establishing a prosperous apothecary business with one of his cousins. In his early thirties, however, Tilley’s association with the Sons of Temperance, an organization dedicated to prohibition of alcohol, inspired him to enter politics. He was elected to the Provincial Assembly of New Brunswick and promoted to the rank of Provincial Secretary in the 1860s.
As a staunch supporter of the growing Confederation movement, Tilley attended the Charlottetown, Quebec and London Conferences and was rewarded with a federal post in John A. Macdonald’s first cabinet. It was Tilley who suggested “The Dominion of Canada” as the name of the new nation. Later Tilley served two terms as Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick.
This Community Memories exhibit documents a life well lived for the little boy from Gagetown, a lifetime dedicated to public service, duty and the nation he helped construct.
