Sussex Vale
Sussex Vale
1787 – 1826
The Indian College, Sussex Vale / The Indian Academy, Sussex Vale
Operated by the New England Company
The Indian College at Sussex Vale opened in 1786 near what is today Sussex Corner, New Brunswick. It was operated by an Anglican missionary society, the New England Company, which had turned its focus north following the American Revolution. Over the nearly four decades that the Sussex Vale Indian College operated, it came under criticism for failing to adequately feed its charges, failing to send them to school, and for exploitative labour practices that saw students sent out to work for the local community under the guise of apprenticeship while their “masters” were provided financial compensation for their part in the arrangement. Other criticisms focused on concerns about moral improprieties. In 1826, the New England Company abandoned its Sussex Vale project and turned its attention to Upper Canada where it would soon open the Mohawk Institute, near what is now Brantford in Ontario.
A description of the Sussex Vale Indian College by the Reverend Leonard Allison, published in 1892, described the last remaining evidence of the institution as “little wooden crosses in Ward’s Creek cemetery,” almost certainly a reference to the old section of the Trinity Anglican Cemetery near present-day Sussex Corner, NB.¹
¹ Quote from: Leonard Allison, The Rev. Oliver Arnold, first rector of Sussex, N.B., with some account of his life, his parish and his successors and the old Indian College (Saint John : Sun Print. Co., 1892), 25. https://www.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.06079/37
