In Valley Gold, Anne Hutten’s history of the Valley’s apple industry, the author writes that a Gravenstein tree in Lakeville, Kings County, bore fruit for over 150 years. Planted in 1799, the tree was productive, Hutten said, until succumbing to a brush fire.
Is this a fact or is it simply something somebody told someone, a story that was passed along over the generations? Is it folklore, in other words?
Hutten offers no documentation on the age of the Gravenstein, so it might be folklore. Yet apple trees do live 100 years and more. One apple tree, believed to be the oldest in North America, says Google, died in 2020 at the age of 194.
Continue reading“The first anniversary of the opening of the Windsor and Annapolis Railway was celebrated on Thursday last in Waterville,” reported the Daily British Colonist in its issue of August 23, 1870.
Upward of 400 employees and guests participated in the celebration in Waterville, the paper reported, the “demonstration” culminating in a supper at the Kentville Hotel where general manager Vernon Smith “entertained a number of gentlemen.”
“The Kentville Star contains an interesting description of the (railway) buildings and equipment,” the Colonist further reported, “which we shall publish in our next issue.”
Continue readingBetween 1843 and 1846, a parish of the Anglican persuasion was opened in Kentville on Church Street (now Aberdeen Street) “not far from the present post office.”
This was the original location of the St. James Anglican Church. In 1883, a move was made to its present location on Prospect Avenue. Louis Comeau said that “the whole church, minus its steeple and powered by several teams of oxen, was hauled around the corner of Main Street, hoofing their way to their future home.”
I’m quoting from a talk and tour Comeau emceed in June on the stained glass windows at the Anglican Church. The move, by oxen power, was one of his interesting asides. In another aside, Comeau said the church, in its original location, “contained three (possibly four) stained glass windows” that went along on an ox team to the new premises. These windows can be seen in the church today at the rear of the pulpit.
Continue readingUnlike Canard and Grand Pre, Kentville and New Minas are usually overlooked when it comes to discussing Acadian settlements in Kings County.
Yet as Grand Pre curator Susan Surette-Draper points out, while New Minas wasn’t a major settlement, numerous Acadian homesteads have been identified in the village. In a historical talk on New Minas, Maynard Stephens also refers to various homestead sites – as well as an Acadian cemetery and mill, of which more later.
As for Kentville, I’m aware of only one Acadian homestead site that has been positively identified. Undoubtedly there are more, but the Cornwallis River isn’t very “dykeable” in the town limits, which may explain the lack of Acadian homesteads.
Continue readingOn this date about 130 years ago, Leander Eaton, Esq., of Canard was busy building an addition “to his already large and first-class barn.”
At the same time, E. and O. Chase of nearby Church Street were making extensive repairs on their farm where an “old barn is being raised to the same level as the new one.”
This informal, folksy news was reported in the June 10, 1891, issue of Kentville’s weekly newspaper, the Western Chronicle. In the same issue, the paper reported that horse racing would resume at the Kentville Driving Park, that there have been “fine catches of salmon” in weirs at Halls Harbour, where coincidentally, J. W. Thorpe is “making extensive repairs in his house.”
Continue readingWriting in this paper in 1999, Brent Fox said that as well as continual tidal action, dyke owners around the Minas Basin had to contend with a series of large storms that come every 18 years.
Fox dubbed this the Seros cycle, of which the most famous is the Saxby Gale of 1868.
The sea has the upper hand, Fox concluded, and nowhere is this more obvious than the shoreline around the Minas Basin. The Wellington Dyke, which was completed in 1812, protects some 1226 hectares of prime farmland. If Wellington Dyke ever should break, not only this rich farmland but entire communities along the Canard River would cease to exist overnight.
Continue readingWhen a government agent inspected the Horton (Greenwich) poor house/farm in 1891, there were 22 inmates.
In the history of Kings County, A. W. H. Eaton referred to these inmates as the poor and needy. They were the elderly as well. A sign posted recently at the Greenwich poor house indicates that one of the residents was 85 when he died there in 1915.
This was George Pickles, origin unknown. I read his name aloud when I visited the poor house cemetery recently, and he stirred my curiosity. What was his story? He lived to an exceptional age at a time when the average life span was around 60. Was he infirm? Was the poor farm a last resort in his later years? Perhaps he was challenged in ways other than physical.
Continue readingA clipping I found in a 1940s scrapbook on the sale of a Windsor newspaper led me to re-read L. S. Loomer’s book, A Journey in History.
In the index to this book on Windsor’s history, Loomer has nine entries referring to newspapers. When you check the pages indicated, several refer to the Hants Journal and to a couple of Windsor newspapers that closed up after a year or two of publication.
Nowhere in the book is mention of Windsor’s long-running newspaper. At least not by its full name. On page 327, Loomer refers to the paper simply as the Tribune, the only clue that two newspapers once served the town.
Continue readingWas it a coincidence that Sir Frederick Borden (Minister of Militia and Defence) prepared a Bill late in 1910 proposing the construction of a railway to Cape Split, where a major power project was being considered?
The railway, if constructed, would have its terminal at Cape Split, reaching it in a roundabout way.
Borden’s proposal had the rail line starting in his riding in Canning. After running northward to Pereau, Delhaven, Blomidon, and Scott’s Bay, the line would turn eastward and run to Cape Split. Various branches running off the main line also were proposed. Borden and his business partners in Canning and Kentville were believed to hold land at the time in areas the proposed rail line skirted.
Continue readingIn his talk at the Kentville Historical Society on March 21, Windsor-born Fred Huntley reminisced about growing up around trains.
Huntley said he saw his first train in Hants County. This was in Upper Burlington when he was eight: “a doubleheader gypsum train westbound that simply amazed me.”
The theme of Huntley’s talk at the Society meet was the history of the Kentville train station. And as the talk progressed, Huntley’s life-long love affair with the railway became obvious. This led, for one thing, to Huntley developing a remarkable skill in building miniature to-scale railway theme models. One of the miniature models he created – the Kentville railway station as it looked about 100 years ago – was displayed at the meeting.
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Ed Coleman 