A comprehensive history of Kentville has never been written. Much of what is documented on the town exists in fragments, in folklore and historical glimpses.

You won’t find documented anywhere, for example, that Kentville was a quiet village in a corner of Horton township when the railway arrived.

It isn’t written anywhere that Kentville boomed, more than doubling in size a few years after the railway arrived. You won’t find it recorded that the NS Sanatorium and Camp Aldershot added extra spurts to the town’s growth.

You can find plenty of Kentville trivia – such as the folktale that the town owes its location to a Mi’kmaq/Acadian crossing on the Cornwallis River, or that the Duke of Kent passed by, circa 1794, to give the town its name.

But Kentville has a more diverse history than this trivia – a history that includes the Mi’kmaq, Acadians, and the Planters. Most of this history has been stored away or forgotten, however. Mabel Nichol’s book (The Devil’s Half Acre) tells some of the town’s story, as does Arthur W. H. Eaton in his history of Kings County. Some of the town’s history can be found in railway books, but like the works by Nichols and Eaton, they only tell part of the story

Further, organizations such as the Kings Historical Society and the Kentville Historical Society have stores of data but don’t present historical views of Kentville. In effect, the town’s history is stored away in museum files, or scattered around in various documents, books, and genealogy records. So generally speaking, you can consider the historical society collections to be lost as far as public access to them goes.

However, this has been remedied and “lost” may be the wrong word here. For nearly 5 decades, one man has been collecting and documenting the history of the town, amassing thousands of artifacts, hundreds of photographs, and countless newspaper articles related to Kentville’s history. And for the first time ever, a historical timeline on the town has been created.

Accomplishing this feat is author/historian Louis Comeau whose crusade to collect, catalog, and write the history of Kentville began in the 1970s after he inherited a collection of artifacts his father had put together.

            His father, Dr. Lin Comeau, was a dentist who practised in Kentville from 1949 to 1975. Dr. Comeau started collecting in 1955 when he purchased the old A. A. Thompson house on Wickwire Hill in the east end of Kentville. “After purchasing this historic house my father collected in earnest, with no particular artifacts in mind,” Louis Comeau says. “If it was historical, it went into his collection. He filled the Thompson house with furnishings suiting its age (the house was built around 1900). In no time the house and two adjacent carriage houses were filled with antiques.

“It became quite an eclectic collection with everything from hatpin holders to a surrey. My father collected enough items to set up a replica of a general store and a cooperage, all depicting life as it was around here in the 19^th century.”

Included in Dr. Comeau’s collection were thousands of documents and photographs about Kentville. So when Comeau decided to carry on with his father’s work, he specialized in artifacts, documents and photographs solely on the town. When his father passed away in 1975, Comeau continued collecting anything of historical interest about Kentville. He has since catalogued the entire collection and put together an immense database now containing over 12,000 historical entries on Kentville.

Today Comeau’s home is a miniature museum devoted entirely to the history of the town. The collection provides a magnificent overview of the town’s history going back well over 100 years. The photographs alone are priceless but there’s much more than pictures in his collection. For example, Comeau has the studio camera used by famed Valley photographer A. L. Hardy, who was based in Kentville from 1892 until 1935 and was the official photographer for the Dominion Atlantic Railway.

As well, many of Hardy’s prized Kentville photographs are in Comeau’s collection. In addition to the Hardy prints, Comeau has other Kentville photographs dating back to the previous century. His collection includes over 100 books and pamphlets, old calendars, mementoes from long-gone stores, old newspapers, and an extensive collection of pins, badges, ledgers, signs, maps, posters, medals, watches, and postcards.

Comeau has managed to do what has never been done before – collect and, in effect, consolidate the history of Kentville into a single computer-based document. Yet he concedes that despite the current state of his collection, his work is far from done; he’s still digging into Kentville’s history, attempting currently, for example, to pinpoint the location of houses, churches, and stores that once stood in the town. It’s an obsession in a way, he admits. If a little piece of Kentville history is missing from his collection, Comeau says he won’t rest until he finds it and adds it to his database.

Surprisingly, despite his massive collection, Comeau is still unearthing historical tidbits. “This work takes all of my free time,” he says. “You have to be a detective of sorts to date some of the artifacts I’ve found and sometimes I feel like Sherlock Holmes.”

Once he’s satisfied he has searched every corner and found every historical nugget that’s out there, Comeau plans to sit down and write a definitive history of Kentville. “That’s in the planning stage right now,” he says.