Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham) was shipwrecked in the Gulf of St Lawrence. Tradition holds that one of the ship's boats, named the "Chatham", washed up near the Miramichi River, giving rise to the town's name. In 1800 Francis Peabody, a successful businessman, settled in the location that became Chatham, which was then known as The Spruce, after a large spruce tree. The Miramichi River is nearly a mile wide here. Its channel comes very close to the shore at this spot, so it was a natural place to build wharves. Logs from the large watershed of the river could easily be floated to this point for milling and export. The best salmon fisheries were nearby. Other settlers followed, but growth was relatively slow throughout the early part of the 19th century. The first newspaper published in the North Shore of New Brunswick was the Mercury, founded in Chatham in 1825. By 1834 the first bank opened. A stage coach left each Monday for Fredericton. The settlement attracted a group of aggressive entrepreneurs, Scottish and English, such as Joseph Cunard, William Muirhead, Jabez Bunting Snowball, and later, W. S. Loggie. Gradually, the community became a centre for lumber mills, shipbuilding, and exporting fish and forest products to the British Isles and, later on, to the United States. In its early days, Chatham was bustling, energetic, growing and confident. Chatham attracted the Maritime lawyer Richard Bedford Bennett, later to be prime minister of Canada. In 1896 when Chatham held its first elections for Town Council, the young Bennett was elected by one vote. He was then employed with the law firm established by Lemuel Tweedie, a former Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick. Bennett's campaign manager was a 17-year-old "articling" student by the name of Max Aitken. Aitken grew up in Newcastle and would later become Lord Beaverbrook. He was appointed the Minister for Aircraft Production in Winston Churchill's World War II cabinet. By 1851, Chatham had 505 employed persons among the following occupations: 170 labourers, 74 servants, 60 shipwrights, 25 joiners, 20 cordwainers, 19 farmers, 16 clerks, 13 blacksmiths, 12 merchants, 10 tailors, 9 storekeepers, 7 sawyers, 7 teachers, 5 blockmakers, 4 sailmakers, 4 riggers, 4 stage drivers, 4 butchers, 4 printers, 3 clergymen, 1 sparmaker, 1 gunsmith, 1 surgeon and 1 constable. A police force was started in 1858, telephones came to the town in 1880, and street lighting was installed