In the recent column about my great uncle John Coleman, the Kings County jailer from 1896 to 1928, I mentioned a ballad about the jail during his tenure there. While my father knew a few lines of the ballad, I assumed most of it had been lost or forgotten over the years. Why would anyone save a minor song about a county jail, especially when it was of no historical significance?

I didn’t reckon with the likes of Gaspereau historian, Murrille Schofield. Mr. Schofield, whose historical notes on Wolfville, Gaspereau, and nearby communities was my topic last week, had a copy of the ballad in his papers. I discovered this thanks to Lexie Davidson whose history of Forest Hill-Gaspereau Mountain was mentioned in this column recently.

The ballad of John Coleman’s jail was written by two young men from Gaspereau Mountain who came from one of the first families to settle the area after the Acadians. Apparently, they spent one or two nights in jail for creating a disturbance by shouting. Kentville’s then chief of police, Rupert Davis, did the honours, and he is the “Pup Davis” mentioned in the first stanza.

“Oh Mr. Pup Davis, the cop of the town/With his brass button coat you’ll see him step round./He’ll hop on a stranger and take him to jail/Then search all his pockets and lock up the cell.”

To the chorus of “And it’s hard times in John Coleman’s jail, and it’s hard times they say,” the ballad continued for four more stanzas. None of it is complimentary. The food is cold mush, the Parson charges for a visit, bedbugs are plentiful. All of which must be taken with a grain of salt, of course. The sour notes of the ballad contradict what I’ve discovered about the way John Coleman ran the jail. Besides, if you are one of the tenants, what else is there to say about time spent in jail, especially a jail of the early 1900s?

According to Murrille Schofields’s notes, the ballad of John Coleman’s jail was written by some of his relatives. I believe the version in his files is authentic. The melody is unknown but it was probably sung to the tune of one of the old ballads that have been around for generations.

There’s more to the story about the balladeers who slurred John Coleman’s jail. Some of Murrille Schofield’s relatives were notoriously skilful and biting when it came to writing poems about the people of Gaspereau Valley and Gaspereau Mountain. They had a knack for portraying in rhyme the foibles and traits, both good and bad, of the people in the region. The poems were witty and humorous, but only if you weren’t the victims of their often biting satire.

Recently I had the opportunity to read a few of these poems and I can understand why Gaspereau people were “scandalized.” As for how the verses came to light, the way I heard it was that they were mailed one or two at a time to various households. The “perpetrators of this purple poetry” wished to remain anonymous, so the mailings were done from outside areas. I believe that at the time a number of the verses were posted in public places around the Gaspereau Valley.

From what I can ascertain, all this poetry writing took place over half a century ago and the people mentioned in them are deceased. The uproar they caused is still remembered, however. The verses have been preserved but given their nature, there’s little chance any of them will be published.

The late Murrille Schofield, writer and historian, was the author of a series of historical pamphlets that the old Nova Scotia Light & Power Company mailed out with utility bills. Mr. Schofield was a lifelong collector of local history and his special interest area appears to have been Wolfville, Gaspereau and the adjacent south mountain communities of Bishopville, Greenfield, Newtonville and Black River. He notes in one of his essays that it would be impossible to write a history of Gaspereau without including these communities. “Gaspereau,” he explains, “is too intertwined with the entire mountainside.”

Some of Murrille Schofield’s research – a series of historical trivia from Wolfville and the greater Gaspereau area – has been included in the work Lexie Davidson recently compiled on Gaspereau Mountain. While of no historical significance, this trivia gives us a look back at life in one of the first Valley areas to be settled after the Acadians were removed. Some of the more interesting trivia follows:

“A delightful legend has it that Gaspe, a musical Acadian in the 17th century, traveled the settlements along the river singing his songs troubadour fashion, and the grateful settlers named the river ‘waters of Gaspe’ or in French, Gaspereaux. When the New England Planters arrived from 1758 on, they called it Salmon River, as is attested on the old grants and deeds.

“September, 1884. William Benjamin purchased property near the Gaspereau bridge from James A. Coldwell. He built a dyke or breakwater and removed an island from the middle of the river. He then engaged in wool pulling and the manufacturing of kid calf gloves with sheep wool linings.

“There was considerable cider making in Gaspereau, 400 bushels (of apples) a day being chomped and crushed for the tasty… beverage.

“1886. R. Pratt of Wolfville has family flour at $5.25 to $6.00 a barrel. The barrel and flour together weighed 219 pounds. The story is told that Bill Thompson, lumberman, miller, stonemason and barn builder, shouldered a barrel of flour at the Gaspereau store and carried it up the mountain… about a two mile lug, most of it uphill.

“1888. The Acadian advertised lime at $1.50 a cask. It was mostly used for mortar work (walls, ceilings and chimneys) and in outhouses at that time.

“1889. In Gaspereau the sawdust from the S. P. Benjamin Mill at White Rock was causing pollution and there were letters to the Acadian.

“1890. Silas Baker shod about 120 yoke of oxen (in Gaspereau) between December 1 and March 7.

“1892. Wolfville had some new winter technology, a snowplow, only used after 3:00 p.m.

“1896. The Willow Vale Tannery was paying 6 cents a pound for hides. No doubt Valley farmers and mountain men took advantage of this market. My great grandfather, James Schofield, used to tan his own hides and make shoes for his family and others.

“My paternal grandfather, Emory Schofield, was in charge (of the Fullerton Lumber Mill at Moosehorn Lake). He had his son Austin working as a cook. The boy noticed a peculiar looking bone in the salt meat barrel and dug around until he pulled it out. It was a horse leg with an iron shoe on the foot.

“March, 1904. Wolfville had an earthquake.

“1914. The Boot Island Fox Company was incorporated with $100,000 capital. it was another financial pipe dream, as investors soon realized.”

Kings County farmer Louis Millett tells me he laughs when he hears someone sending tourists down to Hants County to see the tidal bores. “We have a tidal bore in Kings County and few people seem to be aware of it,” Millett says.

Millett is referring to the tidal bore – or more accurately mini-tidal bore – on the Cornwallis River, which while not as awesome as the one on the Avon or Shubenacadie, can be quite a show at times. Millett farms the dykeland along the Cornwallis in New Minas where he says he has witnessed some impressive, fast-moving bores on the river at tide change. “At times,” Millett says, “the crest reaches as high as (an estimated) two and three feet.”

Like our Minas Basin tides, which for a long time were neglected as a tourist attraction, the tidal bore on the Cornwallis may simply have been overlooked. It appears that the bore on the Cornwallis is more evident higher up the river where the banks are narrow and the tide waters constricted. One of the best place to see the bore is the Middle Dyke Road extension which crosses the Cornwallis at New Minas.

Magnetic Hill

“Old-timers in this vicinity recall the days when it was thought the hill at the foot of the mountain possessed some fantastic illusion, while others failed to believe it was more than the exaggerated imagination of pleasure-seeking holiday makers,” A. Marie Bickerton writes in the history she compiled in 1980 on Canning and Habitant.

Ms. Bickerton was referring to another little-known phenomenon, the “magnetic hill” located on the road running from Canning to the Look-Off. Ms. Bickerton places the magnetic hill at the base of the Look-Off mountain and that’s where I began my search for it some 30 years ago. With the help of residents, I found the section of road where vehicles appear to be magically drawn uphill when placed in neutral.

Actually, it’s an optical illusion. The “hill” appears to be an uphill rise in the road, but if you look at it from different angles you can see that it’s a downhill grade. But illusion or not, Kings County’s “magnetic hill” should be marked or at least noted. Perhaps this is this another tourist attraction we’re overlooking.

Great Views

While the view from the North Mountain at the Look-Off is undoubtedly the most spectacular and most popular in this area, Kings County has other vistas worth investigating.

If you appreciate pleasant, sweeping scenery, check out the Ridge Road which runs from Wolfville to White Rock. If you drive up the highway that passes the Old Orchard Inn and new Horton School and turn east on the Ridge Road, there are several magnificent views of the Minas Basin and the mouth of the Cornwallis River with Blomidon and the North Mountain in the background. Drive farther along the Ridge Road and at the Stile near Wolfville there’s an interesting view of the Gaspereau Valley.

At the east end of the Gaspereau Valley take the road up West Brooklyn Mountain for a look at the Minas Basin from a different angle. The ridges along the West Brooklyn Mountain road are among the highest in Kings County and the view almost rivals that of the Look Off.

Other views worth checking out in this area, especially when fall foliage is on: From the Gaspereau Valley drive up the Wallbrook Mountain road and look north when you reach high ground. From the village of White Rock drive south to the top of White Rock mountain for a look at the Gaspereau Valley and the ridges that define it.

When I was talking with Clementsvale writer Reg Baird this summer he told me about an outing with his late father when they went into the woods and “snigged out a few logs.”

I knew exactly what he meant. Around this neck of the woods lumberjacks and farmers have been snigging logs for as far back as I can remember. “Snig” or “to snig out” is a common expression, meaning simply to attach a chain or heavy rope to a log and drag it out of the woods, usually with a beast of burden or tractor. If you talk to people who work in the woods today, especially people of the older generations, you will find that they still speak of snigging out logs. In some cases the word has also come to mean to move something that may be stuck, as in “We snigged the car out of the ditch.”

Snig may be a word born in the lumberwoods and farmlands of the Annapolis Valley and it undoubtedly is slang. As mentioned, I’ve heard snig and its variants snigged and snigging used often in various ways and accepted it as a legitimate word associated with lumbering. People tend to accept a word as legit when their fathers, grandfathers, friends and peers use it in their everyday speech.

Having literally grown up with the word, imagine my surprise when snig was rejected by the Scrabble program on my computer The computer informed me, in effect, that there was no such word as snig. After the game, which the computer won because snig was rejected, I consulted several dictionaries and couldn’t find the word. I was perplexed; how could so common a word not be recorded anywhere? Anyway, I decided snig must be a word coined here and forgot about it.

Recently I had the enjoyment of reading a history of families in the Forest Hill (Gaspereau Mountain) area by Lexie Davidson. While writing the history, Ms. Davidson came across the word “sneg,” which as it turned out, meant the same as “snig.” Like me, Ms. Davidson was stymied when attempting to learn more about this word. However, the following from her history confirms that “snig” is or was once in common usage.

“Pearley (Davison) was telling me about working in the woods and he mentioned… driving the sneg (rhymes with fig) horse. I wanted to jot this down. However, I wondered how to spell sneg. I scoured the two dictionaries we have and all the ways of spelling it that I could think of. I failed to find it anywhere. I asked (Pearley) if it could be that the word was sneak horse, instead of sneg horse. Pearley assured me that it wasn’t, that the horse didn’t sneak the log out, he snegged it out.”

Ms. Davidson contacted Lloyd Duncanson and explained that she wanted to use the word ‘sneg’ but couldn’t find it in the dictionary. Mr. Duncanson was surprised, she writes. “He had always heard others use the term… and he used it himself. So he explored his dictionaries and called someone he felt might know. Nevertheless, none of us was able to find such a word, even though it was and is widely used in this area.”

Ms. Davidson’s conclusion was that “sneg” (or more commonly “snig”) is a word or expression unique to this area. A friend suggested that “snig” might a corruption of the verb “snake,” to drag a log or limb forcibly along the ground.

This may be so but I like to think that people in this part of Nova Scotia invented a new word; or simply applied an Old World word to the pioneer activity of clearing out the forest.