Hundreds, possibly even thousands of ships may have been built along the Bay of Fundy and around the Minas Basin shore during the age of sail. Many of those ships were registered and can be found in marine archives, but there was a period when marine registries such as the one at Windsor didn’t exist. In other words, there may be no official records of some of ships that were built in tiny, now forgotten ports and many are remembered only in family records and folklore.

Given the time frame when these ships were being built – the early Planter period to the first decade of the 20th century – researching and compiling records would be a difficult, time consuming task requiring dedication, perseverance, and a lot of detective work

Obviously, Hantsport marine historian Joey St. Clair Patterson has that dedication and perseverance in abundance. Next month, Patterson will release Hantsport Shipbuilding 1849-1893, a book he wrote after nearly a quarter century of research into shipping and genealogy records. Patterson began working on his book after he moved to Hantsport in 1985.

The title of Patterson’s book is a bit misleading, but that’s to the reader’s gain. Yes, the book is all about Hantsport shipbuilding, with particular emphasis on the renowned shipyards of the Churchill family. But before getting into the shipbuilding, Patterson covers the early history of Hantsport in detail with biographies of its founding families, many of whom were seafarers as well as shipbuilders of renown.

Patterson’s book is also a record of shipbuilders outside of the Hantsport area. While telling the story of Hantsport shipbuilding, he writes about the shipyards of Kingsport, Canning, and the shipyards great and small in other seaside communities around the Minas Basin and Fundy shore that turned out more than a few famous sailing crafts.

Nova Scotia was once known world wide as a country of hardy seafarers and shipbuilders. I never understood how Nova Scotia earned this reputation, but Patterson’s work explains it to some extent. Those hardy seafarers and the wooden ships that carried them around the world are brought to life by Joey Patterson. Page after page of seafaring lore, the stories of the men behind Nova Scotia’s shipbuilding era, make up a book that marine history buffs will cherish.

As I intimated, this is really two books in one: A history book, about Hantsport and its founders, and a book about marine lore and sailing ships. You’ll enjoy both aspects of the book.

(Patterson’s book launching will take place on August 13 from 2 to 4 p.m. in the Hantsport Memorial Community Centre.)

“Over 20 big vessels were built here,” Rachel Pineo-Corkum wrote circa 1950 in her history of Scots Bay. The Bay isn’t as well known for shipbuilding as Canning and Kingsport, so sailing ship buffs may want to investigate this interesting revelation. I’m guessing on the year she wrote this little known history, the guess based on a line reading, “nearly 200 years ago, about 1750, etc.”

Rachel Pineo-Corkum was a school teacher in Scots Bay and I believe the history was produced as a series of lessons for her students. I read the history recently – it’s in the Scots Bay file at the Kings County Museum – and it’s written in a style children could understand and follow. Ms. Pineo-Corkum may have gleaned some of her information for the paper from an earlier work by Abram Jess (The History of Scotts Bay (sic) dated 1941). However, as a resident of Scots Bay with close blood ties to many long time residents, she undoubtedly had access to some of the earlier history and folklore of the village; she undoubtedly wrote some of the history, in other words, by interviewing village people.

While Ms. Pineo-Corkum’s history is one of the earliest written on Scots Bay, she is unsung as a historian. Centreville historian Mack Frail notes that her history has “often been put to use,” but she receives little credit for it. Frail is Pineo-Corkum’s nephew and he’s put together a mini profile of her life, which is included in an article he recently wrote on Scots Bay.

Mack Frail says he doesn’t have all the details on his Aunt’s life but family folklore has it that her parents died when she was a child and she was left in an orphanage in the States. “A relative located her and brought her back to Scots Bay,” Frail writes, where she lived with his grandmother. “Aunt Rachel was a school teacher who married Hardy Corkum in 1918. As well as writing history, she wrote short stories that she sold to magazines. She was an accomplished artist, and was written about in magazines. I never heard that she sold her paintings, only that she gave them to friends and relatives, and many can still be found in local homes.”

In her Scots Bay history, Rachel Pineo-Corkum recounts some of the folklore about hunting and fishing from the early days of the village. She names the shipbuilders of Scots Bay, the Steeles, Tuppers, Lockharts, Ells, Newcombes and Thorpes, who still have descendants living here, and writes about the origin of the village’s name. While modest in length, her history is invaluable as a record of a Kings County outport. To repeat what Mac Frail said about the history, it is often quoted but Pineo-Corkum is never acknowledged as the author.

Let’s hope this will be rectified one day. Hopefully, Mack Frail will eventually be able to fill out the full story of this Scots Bay writer, and she will be recognized for the historian she was.

To say that Richard Skinner has an interest in old maps could be a bit of an understatement. After talking with him recently about an old map of Cornwallis Township, one of the original divisions of Kings County north of the Cornwallis River, I’d say his interest is close to being an obsession.

Skinner has been studying old maps for decades, and his interest in them started when he was a youth. “I found an 1864 Kings County (Ambrose) Church map in a dump and took it home,” he said in effect, “and that started it all.” He found the details on the map fascinating, since it showed the old county roads – “some that no longer exists” – and the people who lived along them.

After he developed an interest in genealogy, Skinner found that the Church map was an important tool in tracing families. However, his interest in old maps of the county really heightened when he came across a Cornwallis Township map that predated the Ambrose Church map of Kings County by over half a century.

Ambrose Church began producing maps of the various counties of the province around 1864. Church was commissioned by the provincial government and one of the first maps he produced was of Halifax County in 1865. While the map of Kings County is dated 1864, it actually wasn’t released publicly until nearly a decade later. In 1872, Church received a grant of $584 for the provincial government for completing the Kings County map and this usually given as the year it was published.

As mentioned, Church wasn’t the first to produce county maps. Early in the 19^th century, well before Ambrose Church appeared on the scene, the government had a series of county maps produced by the Surveyor General, Charles Morris. Working with the surveyor Charles Harris, Morris produced a Kings County map with an inscription indicating it was “made in the month of December A.D. 1818 and January 1819.”

Richard Skinner discovered the existence of this map over a decade ago and he found so many errors, misspellings and roads that don’t exist today that he set about updating and correcting it.

“It was incomplete and difficult to read,” Skinner says of the Cornwallis Township section of the map “and this was what really got me into researching maps. Canaan was spelled ‘Canan’, Canard was ‘Cannar’, Pereau is spelled ‘Piereau’, and so on. The map even shows a continuous road along the foot of Black Rock mountain that I’m sure doesn’t exist.”

Skinner is still working on updating the Cornwallis Township area of the old map. Mainly he’s reset the place names and corrected the spelling. “It’s a work in progress,” Skinner says. “The purpose of my work is not to replace the historic township map but to have a good copy to use in conjunction with it. That’s why I’ve spent so many hours pasting on words that are easier to read.”

At the same time, Skinner is on the lookout for other old maps. He’s heard of an old map of Berwick but hasn’t located a copy of it yet. “Every old map tells a story,” he says. “They show where the original churches stood, where the original Kings County courthouse was located, the old names for our roads and rivers.”

This is what’s so fascinating about old maps,” Skinner says. “There’s so much historical information that can be gained by studying them.”

When M. de Brouillan was appointed Governor of Acadia in 1701, he proposed that two major roads be constructed from the Acadian settlement in Minas. One was to run “10 leagues across the woods” to Port Royal. Once this road was completed, de Brouillan suggested that the Acadians occupying Kings County should “subsequently make a like one to Laheve.”

History tells us the Acadians started the road to Port Royal but never completed it. However, well before the Acadians arrived in Kings County, a track of sorts running towards what was to become the French settlement at Laheve already existed. Folklore has it that on their seasonal migration from the Minas Basin towards the South Shore in pursuit of fish and game, the Mi’kmaq had established a well-marked trail. The expansion of this trail may have been what de Brouillan had in mind when he proposed building a road from Minas.

If folklore is right and the Mi’kmaq established a path from Kings County, south towards the lake country and Chester Basin, then Highway 12, the road that connects Kentville to New Ross, was undoubtedly part of it. We can assume that what is known locally as the New Ross Road follows for the most part the old Mi’kmaq trail. Much later, when the settlement of New Ross was still young, a road from the settlement into the heart of Kings County was again proposed. In his history of Lunenburg County, M. B. DesBrisay writes that the road from New Ross to Kentville was first “deemed impracticable” but later was built. This apparently was shortly after the settlement of New Ross, or Sherbrooke as it was first called, was established in 1816.

This is the second time in his history that DesBrisay mentioned what was to become the New Ross Road. I quoted his other reference to the road at the beginning of this column, the reference to de Brouillan’s proposed road from Minas to the South Shore. In his Kings County history, Arthur W. H. Eaton also mentions de Brouillan’s proposal to connect Kings County with the French settlement on the South Shore. The Acadians, de Brouillan wrote, have engaged to work on the road once the harvest was over.

A history of the New Ross Road has never been written, but Ron Barkhouse says (in a 1990 paper) that if it ever was, it would be an interesting one. Such a history, Barkhouse says, would have to dwell on how Daniel O’Neil of New Ross made Nova Scotia’s first apple barrels in 1863 and the now legendary movement of New Ross trucks carrying the barrels to the Valley for over half a century.

Such a history would have to relate the role the New Ross Road played during prohibition, Barkhouse said, when it was the main thoroughfare for rum runners and such.

On a final note, DesBrisay in his Lunenburg County history indicates that in 1870 the New Ross Road was known as the Horton road, probably because it connected with Horton Township on the south edge of Kings County.

“The sea is not weary. Its vast impersonal force moves tirelessly to destroy the work of men’s hands; and if the dykes are neglected, chaos will come again,” Dr. Watson Kirkconnell said in 1948, on the occasion of his installation as President of Acadia University.

Dr. Kirkconnell was referring to the ongoing, never ceasing struggle against the sea to maintain the “humble barricades of sod and earth” that are the dykes of Kings County. In 1944, a few years before Dr. Kirkconnell made these remarks, he was reminded of how relentless the sea is when the aboiteau on the Habitant (Canning) River collapsed and hundreds of acres of dykeland were flooded.

Kirkconnell undoubtedly had this disaster in mind when he commented about the never ending struggle against the sea. But being a historian as well as a man of letters, Kirkconnell was well aware that since the Acadians began dykeing in Kings County, one disaster after another plagued them and the Planters that followed. In most cases, an unusual combination of tides in Dr. Kirkconnell’s sea that “is not weary” and great windstorms caused the disasters.

The serious breaks in the dykes plaguing the Acadians were rarely recorded. This wasn’t the case after the planters arrived and the dyke disasters after the expulsion are for the most part on record. One of the worst disaster occurred a few years after the expulsion. Between 1755 and a few years after arrival of the Planters in 1760 the dykes were largely left unattended and deteriorated rapidly. Thus when a great gale, combined with high tides, struck the Kings County dykes in 1759 the result was catastrophic.

Several years ago, historian Regis Brun of the Universite de Moncton sent me a quote from the diary of Colonel Fry regarding the gale. Dated November 4, 1759, it read: “Tremendous gales of wind & Surprising Sea that in the course of Providence happened this day.” Brun wrote that this was a storm that “marked its (Nova Scotia’s) history.”

In Kings County, Brun said, the great storm damaged the “aboiteaux and levees constructed by the Acadians, some going back to the 1680s.” Storm damage was widespread elsewhere in the province, but the greatest damage occurred wherever there were dykes.

The sea again proved that it was relentless and far from being weary when the Saxby Gale struck in 1869. Besides the 1759 storm and the Saxby Gale, Brun writes that disaster struck the Acadian dykes on the Minas Basin in 1711. He mentions as well the “1775 gale that killed 2,000 people.”

The great tide that removed some 1,500 tons of rock from the Canning River aboiteau in 1944 is proof that despite centuries of experience in dyke building, there’s still much to be learned. And with global warming and the possibility that sea levels will rise, Dr. Kirkconnell’s observation that chaos will come again sounds prophetic.