“They were essentially mediaeval peasants, simple, pious, frugal. They had the peasant’s hunger for land, the peasant’s petty cunning, the peasant’s greed, all perfectly comprehensible in view of their hard, narrow life of unending toil.

“Their disputes over land were endless. The government found it necessary to settle many of these, to issue proclamations against the neglect of fences and failure to repair dykes; and to repeat orders frequently.”

Will R. Bird wrote this description of the Acadians in a 1950s government publication, Historic Nova Scotia. Bird is describing the Acadian population under English rule after the Treaty of Utrecht was signed in 1713 and his assessment is unflattering, to say the least, and perhaps inaccurate.

It may be presumptuous to question an historian and writer of Bird’s stature but should we accept his inference that the Acadians were a rather base and useless people? Other historians state the opposite when writing about the Acadians. In his Kings County history, for example, Arthur W. H. Eaton writes of the Acadians in this area, which he refers to as the chief districts of Minas and River Canard, as having performed miraculous tasks in settling the area. The Acadians, Eaton wrote, “built houses and churches and small forts, reclaimed from wildness many hundreds of acres of upland fields.”

While historians such as Bird portray them as ignorant, uneducated and shiftless, the Acadians managed to perform a near miracle with their dykes, wresting hundreds of acres of land from the sea. Quoting Eaton again: “And most laborious industry of all (the Acadians) enclosed from the sea several thousand acres of marsh land on the Grand Pre and along the county’s five rivers, the Grand Habitant (Cornwallis River) the Riviere aux Canard, the Petit Habitant (Canning River) the Pereau and the Gaspereau.”

In a recent address before the Kings Historical Society, Advertiser columnist Brent Fox put the industrious character of the Acadians in perspective. Noting that the Grand Dyke protected almost 2,000 acres of the Canard River valley from the salt tides, Fox said this it was all done with hand tools. “One can only imagine the enormous organization that was needed for both the cross dykes and running dykes on the Canard River prior to 1755,” Fox said. “And this does not mention the enormous maintenance efforts required,” he concluded.

The great dykes Eaton and Fox saluted could not have been built by the sort of people Will R. Bird describes. A truer picture of the Acadian character can be seen in that excellent paper on early settlements around the Minas Basin by James S. Martell.

“The Church was the centre of Acadian society,” Martell notes, telling us there was a resident priest at Grand Pre as early as 1689. “Before the expulsion there were five churches in the three population groups around the Minas Basin,” Martell says.

As for the Acadians generally being uneducated and ignorant, at the time this was true of most of the working class population of North America and Europe. However, there’s a hint that the Acadians may have had the first public school in North America. Quoting Martell again, “One writer asserts that Abbe Geoffrey… established schools at Minas, the fruits of which were borne out in the signatures in the Church registers.”

On a lighter note, not all was work and no play in the Acadian settlements on the Minas Basin. “Tradition has it,” Martell writes, “that they even had a track on the marshes for horse racing.”

“To be sold at public auction, by the sheriff of the county of Kings county or his deputy, on Wednesday the fifth day of October next,” begins a Sheriff’s sale notice in an August 1825 edition of a Valley newspaper.

I believe it was history buff Leon Barron who gave me a copy of this old Sheriff’s sale notice, which was published in an early Wolfville paper, the Acadian Recorder. The notice advised the public that the land of one John Eaton would be up for auction, said land being described in detail. The land consisted of pasture, upland and woodland, and for the most part was bounded by the Habitant River and Canard Street. Also included was dykeland, over 20 acres that was near the Canard River, all of which was in the Cornwallis township.

The Sheriff’s sale notice was of interest to me because it named some of the old dykes and the nearly forgotten name of a creek that is a Canard River tributary. Also given, by way of identifying the land for sale, were some of the earlier landowners along the Canard River.

In other words, there was quite a bit of history in the legal notice – a lot more than I realised at the time – so I put it in a file under general historical information. The name of the gentleman who was in financial trouble was noted and I assumed he was a descendant of some of the earliest settlers along the Canard River.

I filed away the photocopy of the newspaper notice several years ago, and except for noticing it occasionally while flipping through the file, never gave it another thought. However, it was to come to my attention again when I read a book on the century farms of Nova Scotia.

In 1967, as a centennial project, the Women’s Institute of Nova Scotia published county by county profiles of century farms. I read the book recently and saw that in most cases the history of each farm was written by the current owner. On some farms, the same family had been occupying them since they were built. Kings County, in particular, has a number of farms that have been in the same family for well over a century.

In Upper Canard is the century farm once owned by Ernest L. Eaton. A noted historical researcher, Ernest most likely penned the farm’s history; he wrote that the farm had been in the Eaton family for five generations since being purchased by an ancestor, John Eaton. At one point, Ernest said, the ownership of the property “became temporarily obscure in the general insolvency connected with the building of the Wellington Dyke.”

Something clicked. I remembered the Sheriff’s sale clipping, that the Wellington Dyke had been completed in 1825, the year the Eaton property went up for auction, and wondered if there was a connection.

There are two books on the building of the Wellington Dyke; one is a nicely printed, polished work by Marjorie Whitelaw, published in 1997. Advertiser columnist Brent Fox authored an earlier, down to the nitty-gritty book on the Wellington Dyke, which is out of print but can still be found at the Kings Historical Society museum in Kentville.

Whitelaw and Fox record that landowners in the area affected by the building of the great dyke mortgaged their farms to finance the project. The result was a spate of foreclosures and Sheriff sales late in 1825. For some farmers, Whitelaw wrote, it was a “ruinous adventure.”

One of the casualties of the Wellington Dyke was Ernest Eaton’s ancestor, John. There was a happy ending, however. In the century farm write-up, Ernest tells us that John’s son, Ward, bought the farm “under a Chancery Deed” and it remained with the Eaton family until 1966.

I’ve mentioned Kentville magistrate Edmund J. Cogswell numerous times in this column, quoting from an essay he wrote on Kentville as it was through the 19th century. I’m indebted to Rev. Malcolm Cogswell, Quebec, who wrote recently with biographical information on Edmund John Cogswell and with a correction on his age.

“My cousin’s wife… sent me your recent article, Is There A Missing New Minas History?,” Mr. Cogswell writes. “I can shed no light on the history but I can give you a little information on Edmund John Cogswell. He was the son of Gideon and Lucilla S. (Perkins) Cogswell and according to information found in The Cogswells of North America (1884) by E. O. Jamieson, he was born 25 May 1838. He was a barrister at Law in Kentville. He received the degree LL.B from (Dalhousie) and the same degree from Harvard University. Jamieson indicates he is much indebted to (Edmund) Cogswell for facts which he gathered and communicated.

“The entry (copied in Descendants of John Cogswell, 1998, compiled by Donald J. Cogswell) contains nothing more – no indication of marriage or children, while Edmond John Cogswell’s two brothers and two sisters all have their (spouses) listed, and three have their children listed. To me that suggests Edmund John Cogswell was unmarried.

“I note one discrepancy: The footnote you found indicated that he died in 1900 at age 75. However, the date of birth given by Jamieson (which I believe he got from Edmond John) is May 25 1838, so by 1900 he would have been only 62.”

Halifax physician Frederick Matthews writes to mention the raiding expeditions of Colonel Benjamin Church into Kings County in 1704. Dr. Matthews suggests that Benjamin’s expedition has perhaps been ignored by historians.

“Your recent article on the Acadian dykes made me think of a recent talk, given in the form of a seminar at the Bigelow reunion… by the local dyke-marshland historian James E. Borden.

“An interesting historical aspect of the Acadian dykes (that) has been forgotten was mentioned by Rev. Eaton in his history of Kings County. (This was) the important early history of the work by the New Englander, Col. Benjamin Church (1639-1717).”

Matthew writes that Church was authorised to conduct raids on the Acadians in this region. “Church’s expedition reached Les Mines (Grand Pre) where he summoned the inhabitants to surrender. Church then burnt the town, broke the dykes and cut the crops. On June 22 he captured Piziquid (Windsor) and on June 23 Cobequid.”

Matthews added that Church through his mother has a connection with the Bigelows of this area.

In his Kings County history, Eaton devotes over a page to the Church raids and frankly, speaks unkindly of them. Church, Eaton said, had the “deserved reputation of being a harsh and unpitying man,” a reputation he lived up to on his raid in the Minas area of Kings County.

When he raided Kings County, Eaton said that Church followed instructions from his superiors to “burn and destroy the homes of the French, cut their dykes, injure their crops, and take what spoils he could,” Church “made huge openings in several of the dykes, so that destructive salt tides swept over the marshes, and then did whatever damage he could to the Minas farmers’ possession.”

Perhaps Church’s senseless depredations may explain why historians ignore him when writing about the Acadians.

“Although the greater part of these settlers were respectable people, yet there were many idlers among them, whose chief inducement to visit Nova Scotia was the provision they were entitled to receive, as a bounty for their emigration.”

In 1829, Thomas C. Haliburton wrote this observation of the settlers who took up the prime agricultural land of the Acadians after the latter’s expulsion. The Planters, as they came to be called, are rightly portrayed as sober, religious and hard working people who uprooted themselves in New England and risked everything to settle here. However, as Haliburton points out in his two-volume “Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia,” there was an element that wasn’t quite so glorious and sober.

Haliburton further observed that “when the most industrious could not obtain the necessities of life without the greatest exertion, it is not surprising that persons of this class availed themselves of the first opportunity of quitting the country, as soon as the government rations were withheld.”

But even when “persons of this class” returned to New England, a dark element remained that is rarely mentioned in history books. The Planters lived in an age of “strict puritanism,” when laws placed restrictions of every kind on people. Failure to attend church, working around home on Sundays were offences; there were laws against swearing, blasphemy, lewdness, disturbances of the peace and immoral behaviour. Within a year of the Planters arriving in Nova Scotia, the provincial government passed a Lord’s Day Act, which among other things, forbade tradesmen and Innkeepers from operating on Sundays.

However, despite indication that all the settlers were law-abiding, bible-carrying people, this wasn’t the case. In 1764, only a few years after arriving in Nova Scotia, the settlers built the first jail in Horton Township. As early as 1761 so many complaints about debt-dodging came from the settlements that the government was forced to appoint Magistrates from among prominent settlers in each county.

Occasionally when I’ve written about the seamier side of settler’s life I’ve had readers take me to task. However, history isn’t all about heroics. The Planters were people who lived close to the soil and there was a rough, coarse element that could not be contained by religious and social restrictions.

This being said, I’d like to quote from the excellent thesis on the Planters by James S. Martell. It would be a mistake, Martell said, to picture all the settlers in the pre-Loyalist period as respectable, law-abiding people. “The records of the Court of Quarter-Sessions tell a darker story. Cases of assault, seduction, illegitimate children, theft, usury, forgery libel, profane swearing and disturbances of the peace were common,

“So was Sabbath breaking and there many amusing charges against persons who went fishing or swimming on the Lord’s Day. Some person even went so far as to grind grain at their mill on Sunday. Murder was not unknown. But assault and illegitimate children were the most prevalent cases before the courts.”

But despite what I quoted here, crime wasn’t rampant and most offences were of a minor nature. That this was the case is indicated by the fact that the government didn’t find it necessary appoint Sheriffs for the Minas Basin region until 1781.