When I asked historian Ivan Smith about early electric power companies in the Annapolis Valley, he said they had a “tangled history.”

Smith’s website, Nova Scotia History Index, contains some of this history. But to get an overview you’d have to read the community histories that have been published in Hants and Kings County. Once you did, you’d find what Smith said was an understatement.

Let’s look at some of the early power companies for an explanation:   We have one major source today of electricity; but there was a time when villages and communities in the Annapolis Valley obtained electric power by forming their own company. In the early 20^th century a group of small independent power companies sprang up in Kings County communities such as Canard and Centreville, but I couldn’t find a similar scenario in Hants County. While these companies were independent, most were linked to a power source common to all.   What they did have in common was that few generated their own electric power.

Continue reading →

“An American exercise in ethnic cleansing” and the “tragic history of mass expulsion and dispersion of a people from their homeland.” Reviewers had this to say and much more in the same vein about John Mack Faragher’s A Great and Noble Scheme, a book about the events leading up to the 1755 expulsion of the Acadians and its aftermath.

Faragher’s book, which was published in 2005, is available in bookstores as well as the local library. I recommend it to anyone interested in a detailed, well-researched narrative on the Acadian expulsion. You won’t find a better history of the expulsion and the intricate machinations behind it, and you will find the Acadian story shocking and saddening. The book is well documented and the purpose of this column is to bring it to your attention. If you want to understand the Acadian story, this book is a must read.

With this said, rather than a detailed review of the book I’d like to point out a few interesting asides Faragher mentions in telling the Acadian story. On the infamous Cornwallis scalping proclamation, for example, Faragher notes that a precedent had been set in 1688 when Governor-General Frontenac of New France established the first bounty on scalps. Then, in 1696, the Massachusetts General Court offered a bounty of 50 pounds on the scalps of “native enemies” which included the Mi’kmaq. In 1704, following a “raid by Abenaki fighters and Canadian militia” on the New England town of Deerfield (in which the town was destroyed and more than half of its 291 residents killed or captured) the Governor of Massachusetts, Joseph Dudley, raised the bounty on native scalps to 100 pounds. Again, the Mi’kmaq were included in the bounty offer.

Continue reading →