Nova Scotia's Lost Communities: The Early Settlements that Helped Build the Province

By Joan Dawson

Stories and photos that bring the people and places of Nova Scotia’s historic past to life.

Beaubassin was once a prosperous farming community at the head of the Cumberland Basin; Africville was the vibrant home of Black Nova Scotians who struggled to make a living and found spiritual solace in their church. Both are now gone, one a casualty of long-ago colonial warfare and the other a victim of misguided urban renewal.

In this fascinating book, author Joan Dawson looks at thirty-seven of this Canadian province’s lost communities: places like Electric City, Indian Gardens, and the Tancook Islands. Some were home to ethnic groups forced to leave. Others, once dependent on factories, mills, or the fishery, died as the economy changed or resources were depleted. But they were all once places where Nova Scotians were born, married, worked, and died. Featuring over 60 archival and contemporary photos and illustrations, Nova Scotia’s Lost Communities preserves those memories with fascinating insights.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781771086042

Joan Dawson

Joan Dawson is a member of the Lunenburg County Historical Society, the Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia, the Nova Scotia Archaeology Society, and the Antiquarian Club of Halifax, and she is a fellow of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society. She has written many articles on maps and local history, co-authored Historic LaHave River Valley, and authored Nova Scotia's Historic Rivers, Nova Scotia's Lost Highways, The Mapmaker's Eye, and The Mapmakers' Legacy. Dawson lives in Halifax.

Book preview

Copyright © 2018, Joan Dawson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission from the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, permission from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5.

Nimbus Publishing Limited

3660 Strawberry Hill Street, Halifax, NS, B3K 5A9

[phone] nimbus.ca

Printed and bound in Canada

NB1295

Design: Jenn Embree

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Dawson, Joan, 1932-, author

Nova Scotia’s lost communities : the early settlements that helped build the province / Joan Dawson.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77108-603-5 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-77108-604-2 (HTML)

1. Nova Scotia—History, Local. 2. Nova Scotia—History. 3. Extinct cities—Nova Scotia. 4. Cities and towns—Nova Scotia—History. 5. Communities—Nova Scotia—History. I. Title.

FC2311.D39 2018 971.6 C2017-907981-6

C2017-907982-4

Nimbus Publishing acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities from the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of Nova Scotia. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Province of Nova Scotia to develop and promote our creative industries for the benefit of all Nova Scotians.

For my fellow travellers, with gratitude

Preface

Travelling along Nova Scotia’s rural highways, we often see abandoned buildings and tumbledown barns, ruins of the failed ambitions of the folk who built them or symbols of the changing fortunes of their descendants who could no longer maintain them. But there are also places where whole communities were once found, whose traces are now mostly invisible. Some are indeed ghost towns, either reclaimed by the forest that was once cleared for their development, or ploughed over for farmland. Some have left clues above ground: an old foundation or the remaining pattern of a former street plan, while some are discernable only to archaeologists. Some were deliberately destroyed, and others simply abandoned in the face of a changing economy and lost to the ravages of time. And some have been supplanted by modern structures that bear no resemblance to the buildings that were once there.

As I was driving along the highway one day, one of my sons suggested that perhaps I should consider writing about these lost settlements. We started to think of some examples. Drumming on the steering wheel, I quickly used up the fingers of one hand and moved on to the next. With that hand also exhausted, we moved on to our toes, lost count, and I began to realize that perhaps this topic did indeed provide the makings of a book.

You, too, may be surprised to learn how many of Nova Scotia’s former communities have been obliterated by time or by human activity. But they were established by real people who made their living there. Why did they choose to settle in those locations in the first place? Why were their communities later abandoned? Exploring the history of these places has been a fascinating journey.

Nova Scotia’s Lost Communities

Acadia Mines

Africville

Beaubassin

Birchtown

Boydville

Broughton

The Canso Islands

Chedabouctou

Cornwallis

Electric City or New France

E’se’get

The Falls

Goldenville

Grand Pré

Guysborough

Indian Gardens

Kejimkujik

LaHève

Liscomb Mills

Louisbourg

St. Anns

McNabs Island

Melanson Settlement

Merligueche

Minudie

The Ovens

Partridge Island

Pisiquid

Pobomcoup

Port Dauphin

Port Royal Habitation

River Denys Mountain

Sebastopol

Sherwood

St. Pierre/Port Toulouse

The Tancook Islands

Uniacke Gold Mines

Introduction

A Mi’kmaw family is shown in front of a wigwam in this photograph dated ca. 1895.

Nova Scotia Archives

An aerial view of what we now call Nova Scotia, before Europeans came to these shores, would show almost all of the region densely forested and with little evidence of human habitation. The Mi’kmaq who inhabited the area lived in the forest, along the rivers and shores, and were often on the move, erecting their wigwams at campsites along the way and again at their destination, and leaving virtually no discernable footprint behind.

This pristine aerial view gradually changed. From the sixteenth century, European fishermen built wooden structures on the shore where they processed their catch and stored their gear when they returned home at the end of the summer. Later, permanent fishing stations were created and, over the years, people cleared land and established settlements based on natural resources, agriculture, trade, and industry, in various parts of the province. Some of these settlements were short-lived and soon vanished completely, while others flourished for a while and then dwindled from bustling communities into sleepy villages. Some were deliberately destroyed. Still others that are known to have existed once are now lost to more recent development that has eradicated all trace of them. But they all have a place in our history and should not be forgotten.

The earliest inhabitants of what is now Nova Scotia were the Mi’kmaq, who have lived for many thousands of years on their land that they call Mi’kma’ki, that extends from Nova Scotia into Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and the Gaspé. Until modern times, they moved seasonally between inland hunting grounds and coastal sites where groups of families came together each summer to fish and gather clams, and to socialize. Because they were nomadic in those early days, their communities were not like the permanent settlements that Europeans built later. Groups of wigwams were constructed every year in traditional encampments, to be taken down and their birchbark covers carried away when the time came to move on. These Mi’kmaw encampments left very little mark on the landscape, leaving nothing behind but lost or broken stone weapons and tools, middens where they discarded animal bones and clamshells, stone weirs where they caught fish, and other signs of their presence such as traces of their wigwams and cooking fires that are discernable only by experts. The location of their seasonal settlements is known by oral tradition among the Mi’kmaq themselves, by historical records, and by evidence that has been discovered in the course of archaeological excavation.

The Europeans who came here in the sixteenth century were fishermen, who crossed the Atlantic in the spring and returned home in the fall. Although they frequently returned to the same harbours every year, they did not initially create settlements. In the seventeenth century, the French began a period of serious colonization, establishing trading posts and fishing stations in Acadie. Briefly, the Scots also established a foothold in the territory that they named Nova Scotia. Permanent settlements as we know them, including an administrative centre, were founded by the French on the Annapolis River, around the Bay of Fundy and Minas Basin, and on the South Shore. Marshland was dyked and drained for farming, and gristmills and sawmills were constructed in suitable spots on rivers and brooks. These Acadian villages survived several changes of government, and remained when mainland Nova Scotia was finally ceded to Britain in 1713. The French retained Cape Breton and established new fortified settlements there. The town and fortress of Louisbourg grew up, and was destroyed and left in ruins within forty years. The Acadian villages on the mainland were also destroyed or abandoned at the time of the grand dérangement in the mid-eighteenth century, when their inhabitants were sent into exile.

A new wave of settlers from New England, who were known as Planters, was invited to Nova Scotia in the 1760s to replace the Acadians and cultivate their abandoned farmland. The British authorities established townships for the new arrivals, each with its town plot and surrounding farmland and woodland, and with access to the coast and fishing grounds. A second group of immigrants came to Nova Scotia following the American Revolution, as Loyalists chose to remain under the protection of the British Crown. They, too, had townships laid out for them. Increasingly, rivers powered sawmills that supported a growing shipbuilding industry. Meanwhile, more British settlers, particularly Highland Scots displaced by the Highland clearances, were coming to the colony, changing the human geography once again. Not all these communities survived, at least not in their original form, for a variety of reasons.

The nineteenth century saw a further increase in population with more arrivals from Scotland, other parts of Britain, and Europe. Coal and other minerals were discovered, initiating mining and manufacturing industries. Nova Scotia had its own gold rush, and instant settlements sprang up to house those engaged in prospecting and mining. By 1900, many of the 459,000 inhabitants of Nova Scotia were living in small towns and villages, while the population of Halifax was less than 41,000. People were working the land, lumbering or fishing, or employed in local industries: lumber camps, sawmills, gristmills, shipyards, commercial shipping, ships’ outfitters, fish plants, mines, blacksmith’s shops, tanneries, woollen mills, and various small businesses.

A graveyard on Big Tancook Island, a once-flourishing community.

Joan Dawson

During the twentieth century, great changes took place in the province’s economy that caused major shifts in population. Wooden sailing ships, the mainstay of many coastal towns, gave way to iron-hulled steamships built in distant places, and many of Nova Scotia’s shipyards closed down. Railways replaced coastal shipping to carry both raw materials and manufactured goods. Small water-powered mills could not compete with more efficient steam mills, and as time went on, large urban factories replaced country mills.

In the second half of the century, the seemingly inexhaustible fishing industry collapsed because of overfishing, causing many seamen to seek work elsewhere. Mines became dangerous or unprofitable, and were closed. With increased mechanization, farm and forestry workers moved from their villages to find employment in new businesses that were growing up in the towns, particularly in Halifax and other larger centres. And when work was hard to find, they went down the road to central Canada and, more recently, to the western oil fields.

Political decisions and military conflicts have caused some communities to disappear, while others have succumbed to economic circumstances. Many readers will recall the old house on Nuttby Mountain in Colchester County that stood deserted for many years, a landmark along Route 311, before finally collapsing. It was once a fine, sturdy farmhouse, where men worked the land and women cared for the house, cooked, sewed, and raised their children. It was abandoned as times changed, and within living memory, it has disappeared. It is perhaps symbolic of the changing economy of Nova Scotia that has caused whole communities to be abandoned, as the resources that provided a livelihood for their inhabitants were no longer profitable.

Not all the lost communities featured in this book are romantic ghost towns deep in the woods. Some were home to ethnic or social groups who were forced or who chose to leave, and their land passed to strangers. Some depended on mills or factories that ceased to be viable, and are no longer busy industrial areas but home to commuters or holiday makers. While in 1900 fewer than one-tenth of Nova Scotians lived in Halifax, today nearly half of us are city dwellers. Some former communities have entirely vanished and their sites have reverted to forest. Others survive in name only, and places that were once humming with industry have shrunk to quiet residential districts. Some are buried beneath later developments. But they were all once places where people were born, grew up, married, lived out their working lives, and died, and they deserve to be remembered.

1

Forest and Shore: Our First Nations

With the arrival of Europeans in Nova Scotia, the lives of the Indigenous Mi’kmaq were inevitably influenced as they adopted new manufactured products and learned new skills. The spread of European settlement also resulted in the loss of their land and eventually in the abandonment of their nomadic way of life. The government’s arbitrary establishment of Indian reserves conceded control of certain areas, but the newcomers’ development of agriculture and industries limited the formerly unrestricted access to the resources from which the Mi’kmaq had traditionally made their livelihood. As a result, many of the sites that they had once frequented became abandoned. Neither their forest homes nor their summer encampments left obvious marks on the landscape, and only oral history and the later work of archaeologists identify the locations of some of the places where communities of wigwams were once established.

E’se’get: A Mi’kmaw Gathering Place

On the South Shore, between the Kejimkujik National Park Seaside Adjunct and the Thomas Raddall Provincial Park, lies Port Joli Harbour. Port Joli today consists of a few houses on the north and east sides of the harbour. Its name, meaning Pretty Harbour, dates back to the seventeenth century, when Champlain and other French adventurers gave names to the harbours along the South Shore and put them onto maps. But its history goes back long before that time, and the earliest inhabitants of the harbour were First Nations people, part of the population of their land of Mi’kma’ki, which extended from today’s Nova Scotia to the Gaspé Peninsula.

Much of the shore of Port Joli Harbour consists of extensive sand beaches where clams flourish. It was these clam flats, particularly those on the southwest side of the harbour, that brought the Indigenous people here at least 1,500 years ago, and probably earlier. They continued to come to this area that they called E’se’get, which means to dig for clams, every summer for many hundreds