Martin Luther Jorden was born at High Bank, P.E.I., on Oct. 11, 1860. He was the fourth child of Edward Jorden and Ruhamah Sencabaugh. Luther grew up in that community, attended the High Bank School, helped work the family farm and did some fishing as a young man. He married Ada Margaret Beck, his second cousin, from the nearby community of White Sands on Oct. 15, 1884. They raised a family of six boys and four girls.

Luther was active in politics and worked hard for the Liberal Party, to the extent that he named their fifth child, born in 1895, Wilfred Laurier Jorden after the Liberal Party leader, Sir Wilfrid Laurier. The Liberals won the federal election in 1896 and it was payoff time for Luther. Tom Munn and his son, John Thomas, had tended the lighthouse at Cape Bear since it was established in 1881. John Thomas was let go in 1898, probably as the new government got around to replacing the former Conservative appointees, and Luther won the job.

The family moved to Cape Bear and lived in the residence that was attached to the lighthouse. They had six children by that time and four more were born while they lived at the Light. Sylvia (MacNeill) VanIderstine, a grandchild, said other members of the Jorden family liked the look of the Beach Point - Cape Bear area and moved down too and soon members of the family owned much of the land there.

When he wasn't busy at the lighthouse, Luther was fishing lobsters and other species in the waters off Cape Bear. In those days the fishermen were paid by the lobster, rather than by weight. Sylvia said the price for a lobster was the same, no matter what its size. Whitman Daly mentions this too in his history of the area and says the price was about one cent for each lobster in the 1890s and later. He said at that time, "lobsters were plentiful and some fishermen hauled their traps two or three times a day." He added that the average daily catch was about 600 lobsters.

Sylvia said that Luther was said to have set a record for a one-day catch, landing 2,600 lobsters. "That would be an awful lot of work," she said. "Row out, row in, no hauler and everything done by hand, and they had to hand-barrow the catch up the bank too." Sylvia's brother, Gerald, "Bub" MacNeill added that there was no shelter for the boats at the Cape and they had to be hauled out at the end of the day. "They used to haul them right up the bank with a capstan. They built a little slide right up the bank and that made it easier. They were strong men," he said.

Sometimes there were accidents on the water too. Bub said that one time Hiram Hyde was rowing out to a mooring off the lighthouse when he upset his dory. Luther jumped into the water and swam out and pulled him ashore. After Hiram got dried off and warmed up, he reversed the story, making himself the rescuer, saying, "Luther, the old bloater, couldn't save himself and I had to pull him out." "Hiram was a great one for telling yarns," Bub said.

With a name like Martin Luther it was only natural that Luther would be a religious man. He was a prominent member of the Baptist Church, and attended church at Beach Point until that building closed and then he went to the church at Murray Harbour. Sylvia said he was quite strait-laced and did not use tobacco or alcohol and frowned on their use by others. She added that he had a strict dress code for men and women, and objected to women wearing short dresses. If the children disobeyed, Luther did not spare the rod. However, he could show leniency too. Bub said that if there was some doubt as to whether they were guilty, "he'd have them put on their overcoat before administering the punishment."

Politics might have played an important role in helping Luther win his job as lighthouse keeper but the appointment came with certain restrictions. People on the government payroll were not supposed to take an active part in party politics. Luther continued to work for the Liberals and that cost him his job. Bub said it was OK to vote himself, but that was all he was supposed to do, but he was driving people to the poll with his horse and wagon. Somebody must have complained about this for Luther lost the job in 1907.

It was around this time that Luther bought the Munn farm from John Thomas Munn so he just moved across the road and into the farm house. He took up farming and continued fishing. It was shortly after this that Wilfred took ill. He was wading in the brook one day and came down with a fever and ended up in bed. He was there so long that his leg muscles atrophied and he wasn't able to walk again. Could this have been a mild case of Polio? At any rate Wilfred lived at home and needed care for the rest of his life. In addition to losing the use of his legs, he also suffered from asthma.

Luther's next move was to buy a schooner. Daly, in his history of the area, has a list of schooners and their owners as compiled by Percy White. Luther owned at least four, and three of them are on the list. They were, in alphabetical order, the Carrie M. C., the Genesta, and the North Star. Sylvia and Bub remembered a fourth, the Bonnie Briar Bush. Sylvia said that every summer he'd reserve one day for a family fishing expedition.

"Some of his children moved to the United States," she said, "and when they'd come home in the summer he'd take them all out on fishing excursions." They'd be handlining for cod and things like that and it was a time for everyone to relax and have fun. "That would be a big day," she said.

Luther carried potatoes and other farm produce to New Glasgow on the schooners for sale to the public at the wharf. Sylvia said that even when he was an old man he was still making those trips to New Glasgow. Charlie Beck remembers those trips. Luther would always go to church on Sunday and the Baptist Church in New Glasgow had a predominantly Black congregation. Charlie said Luther was a great singer, and "they put him right into the choir." Charlie added that they loved to see him coming. "They thought he was really something."

While he never ran for office, Luther had all the instincts of a seasoned politician. He attended most public functions greeting one and all, and he was known far and wide in southeastern Prince Edward Island. Luther never missed a funeral if he could get there. Sylvia said there was a story that one year he attended 200 of them. That seems like an awfully large number for a sparsely populated region. Could that have been during the 'flu epidemic of 1918-19? "Whenever anyone died," Sylvia said, "he'd always attend the funeral, traveling mostly by horse. He'd travel longer distances by train."

Luther was also a fox rancher. He got into the business when it was first starting to grow and he made a lot of money from foxes. Sylvia said he was in the fox business while the foxes were profitable. "By all standards at that time, he was a reasonably wealthy man."

Sylvia remembers visiting him one time when he was feeding the foxes. He had some canned food and was removing the covers. He opened a can and then threw the cover to one side. Then he opened another and threw that cover in the same direction. "You know," he said, "I believe those two landed in the same place." Sylvia said they walked over and the two covers were together, one exactly on top of the other. Apparently he had been doing that so long that he had the toss grooved.

Luther was very proud of his possessions and didn't mind doing a little bragging when people dropped in. Bub said he'd show people around the house and then take them to see his foxes and his horses and other things. The last stop would be at the family dump. "Come and see my dump," he'd say. He wanted people to see the kind of things he was throwing away.

There were no dentists in the area at that time and Luther would pull teeth for people who asked him. Sylvia said he had a bunch of instruments and people would come to him when they had a toothache. There was no freezing, people would just sit in a chair in the kitchen and he'd pull the tooth. Charlie Beck remembers going to Luther with an aching tooth. It was about 1930 and he was only about 10 years old. He made the trip from Murray Harbour to the Cape on his bicycle and he was too small to reach the pedals over the crossbar so he had to ride through and under the crossbar. Luther and Ada were there as well as two of the boys, Carl and Will. "Sure, I'll pull your tooth," said Luther placing a chair in the middle of the kitchen floor.

Charlie said he got out a pair of forceps that looked, to a small boy, like they were for pulling the back teeth of a horse. He put them on the stove to heat and when they were starting to smoke he took them off and waved them around to cool them down. "Now Charlie," said Luther, "you grab them rungs and hang on." Charlie said he yanked it out, "and did it ever hurt." Carl, who was in his late 30s then, said mischievously, "there might be a couple more there you could pull for him, Dad." Charlie said that all he wanted to do was get out the door as fast as he could. There was no charge for having a tooth pulled, as Luther did it as a favour for people.

Luther was a butcher too and he would kill pigs for his neighbours. Charlie had to kill a pig for his grandmother one time and didn't know how to do it. He asked Luther for advice and got detailed instructions and everything went smoothly.

Luther had heart trouble for the last 20 years of his life. Sylvia said that in 1925 when he was 65 he went to Charlottetown on the train to see a doctor about the problem. After examining him, the doctor said, "Mr. Jorden, the best thing you can do is go home and settle up your business. You have heart trouble and there is nothing more I can do for you." Sylvia said he lived for 21 years after that and he took an aspirin every day. She added that he had a little round bottle that he carried in his watch pocket with aspirin in it. "He was the first person in this part of the Island to take aspirin for heart trouble," she said. This was long before aspirin was promoted as a treatment for heart problems so how did he stumble onto this? Could it be that he was having angina pain and was taking the aspirin for pain relief, and so unwittingly was taking the best treatment available?

Ack Irving remembers an interesting encounter with Luther. It was in the late 1930s and Ack was about 7 or 8 years old and was on his way to school. The snow was deep and Luther was traveling by horse and sleigh. Somehow the horse got off the track and the sleigh slid down into the ditch. As a farmboy, Ack had experience with animals so he helped Luther unhitch the horse, get the sleigh back up on the road and the horse hitched up again.

"Thanks a lot, Young Fellow," shouted Luther as he drove off. "I'll remember you in my will." This was a common expression meaning nothing at all. Ack took it literally and thought he was going to come into money, especially since he knew Luther was well off.

Luther's wife Ada died in 1935. She had been caring for Wilfred at home and now the responsibility fell to Luther. There was a falling out with one of the boys on the farm and Sylvia said Luther and Wilfred moved to Beach Point where her parents lived and stayed in what used to be her Grandfather MacNeill's home. Wilfred died in February, 1946. Two months later Luther went to Hazelbrook on the train to visit a Jones family, some of his Baptist friends. He stepped through the door and dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 86.

(Taken from the Aug. 2001 Beck Bulletin, Ivan Munn, editor).