“I could write a volume of quaint stories of the people who farmed these lands and walked these streets… but I am bidden to write history,” Mrs. L. P. Dennison said in an address to the Grand Pre Institute some 70 years ago.

Noting that “time and tide have made such changes,” old-timers returning to the Annapolis Valley would hardly recognise it, Dennison did indeed write history. Her lengthy Institute address, which was printed in The Acadian (Wolfville) on August 25, 1927, was basically a history of early homesteads around Grand Pre and Hortonville; however, as was the case with the George Harvey interview in last week’s column, Mrs. Dennison could not describe the old homesteads without giving us a glimpse of the period when there was only a bridle path between Hortonville, Hantsport and Windsor.

We learn about Hortonville’s link with Canadian history, for example, when Mrs. Dennison comments about a homestead she calls the Dill farm. “The place known as the Dill farm, where the buildings were burned while occupied by Howard Fuller, was quite a notable one. It was the birthplace of the grandmother of Sir Frederick and Sir Robert Borden, a Miss Fuller.”

And we see that in the early days there were a good number of stores and Inns where rum flowed as freely as molasses. “At all these stores and Inns liquor was sold just as molasses is today (by the jug in 1927). The real old Jamaica rum, dark and thick and very much like molasses in appearance, and nearly every man drank and many to their undoing, just as they do today.”

Noting that she wasn’t giving a temperance lecture, Mrs. Dennison says that it may have been much too easy to buy dark rum in the previous century. “They drank up and wasted the property that should have been passed on to their children. They spoiled their own lives ….”

However, in a note on politics in the old days Mrs. Dennison presents a different attitude towards evil old rum: “Something over 100 years ago the counties of Kings and Cumberland were one constituency for election of members to the House of Parliament. Men would come from Cumberland to vote. An election would take nearly a week. What a glorious time they must have had with open houses and the barrels of liquor handed out by the dipperful (!)”

Well, perhaps it was the election, not the rum, that was glorious.

Anyway, before the railroad arrived, the Hortonville area was an important point in Kings and western Hants County. “This part of the country was called Lower Horton until 1869 when the Windsor and Annapolis Railway was built…. Until the bridges over Avon and Gaspereau were finished this (area) was the terminus, passengers and mail being transferred to and from Windsor by teams. Hence the name Horton Landing.”

More on the important role Hortonville or Horton Landing played in the early days: “Rival packets plied between here and Parrsboro. Their decks were fitted to carry cattle, herds of them being (purchased) in Cumberland and bought here to fatten on the dykes. This was the line of travel for students attending the schools in Sackville and must have been quite a contrast to the mode of traveling now.”

The Hortonville area was originally laid out for a town and areas were designated for a courthouse and jail, Dennison says. “Afterward they concluded that Kentville was more central but this would have been an ideal place.”

Born in County Tyrone, Ireland, in 1810, George Harvey emigrated to Nova Scotia with his family when he was six. Harvey’s father purchased land at Horton, a farm “overlooking the Minas Basin and the fertile acres of Grand Pre,” which George eventually inherited and expanded.

George Harvey lived until 1902; a prominent farmer and distinguished citizen of Kings County, Harvey held many important offices during his lifetime, among them commissioner of sewers for the Wickwire Dyke, magistrate, collector of rates and overseer of the poor.

In 1901, about a year before his death, Mr. Harvey was interviewed by a publication called The Echo. Recently I obtained a copy of the interview (compliments of S. M. Bancroft of Black River Lake) which was a series of questions about life before the turn of the century. Some idea of what it was like to live and work here 100 years ago may be gleaned from Mr. Harvey’s answers.

Mr. Harvey was asked numerous questions about farming, for example. One question – “What were the principal products of the farm?” – curiously neglects to mention apples which apparently hadn’t become a major crop when Harvey was a young man. The answer: “Hay, wheat, flax, potatoes and all kinds of meat, such as beef, lamb, pork and poultry. Wheat was a large and profitable crop, as we made all our own flour and had some to export.”

On the marketing of excess farm produce a revealing answer on transportation in the old days: “Halifax was our principal market and there was a fair demand for produce on account of the number of soldiers and sailors there. It was a heavy task to get stuff to (Halifax) as there was no bridge at Windsor and we had to risk (using) the ferry or go many miles further up (the Avon River). This made a long trip across the Horton and Falmouth mountains before reaching the Avon River.” (Mr. Harvey later stated in the interview that the trip to Halifax and back took a week).

Another revealing answer when Harvey was asked how farm produce was shipped: “On horseback or two-wheeled carts. In my early days all vehicles had two wheels, the chaise and gig to ride in, the big cart for hay, the smaller cart for moving vegetables and taking loads to market. I remember the first four-wheeled wagon that came to Horton. It was a great curiosity and a great improvement on its predecessor.”

On postal service: “There was no coach in my early days. Letters were brought by private conveyances or on horseback. The only post office in Horton was at Judge DeWolf’s, at what is now known as Kent Lodge…. The postage on letters from the old country was 3s. 9d., and they were often two months coming.”

Later in the interview, Mr. Harvey said that when he was a boy most of Grand Pre was dyked “except for what is called the Dead Dyke on the east side, containing about 200 acres.” Mr. Harvey helped reclaim this area; at the time of the interview, he was the only man still living who had worked on reclaiming this section of Grand Pre dyke.

On the large crops of hay raised on the Grand Pre dykes: “Well, we fed out a great deal as we made considerable beef in those days and butchers would come from Halifax and buy large droves of fat cattle, sometimes a hundred a day. Then we hauled hay to Halifax.”

Mr. Harvey said he had lived under five British sovereigns: “George 111, George IV, William IV, Victoria and Edward VII. I helped to celebrate the accession of Victoria. We had a brass six-pounder in charge of Colonel Crane and we made things pretty lively.”

Several years ago vandals made off with a plastic and fibreglass likeness of Sam Slick, which stood beside a highway sign outside Windsor. It was said, with tongue-in-cheek no doubt, that the RCMP put out a call for a missing man that was “six-feet tall, 160 years old and two dimensional.”

For many of us, this is the only Sam Slick we know, a two-dimensional character that poses beside Windsor’s exit sign. Other than Windsor’s annual celebration, the modest Clifton House museum and occasional revivals in newspapers and periodicals, Sam Slick receives little attention today from the average man in the street. Almost ignored entirely is Sam Slick’s creator, Thomas Chandler Haliburton, a Windsor lawyer, judge and politician who in his day was an author of international acclaim.

I must admit that about all I knew about Sam Slick is that he spouted some clever proverbs that were coined by his creator – an erroneous idea as you will see – and that Slick was created by Haliburton, who wrote a history of Nova Scotia. Thus I was delighted to listen to Prof. Richard Davies of Acadia University’s English Dept. when he spoke recently on Haliburton at the Kentville Gyro Club. Davies’ theme, “who was Thomas Chandler Haliburton and who is Sam Slick?” illustrated that Haliburton deserves more recognition than annual celebration days and the name of his most famous creation used commercially.

Who was Haliburton and who is Sam Slick? In answering these questions, Prof. Davies offered some enlightening details on Haliburton’s life in his talk to the Gyro Club. Following are a few excerpts and observations from Davies’ talk.

In all, Haliburton wrote 27 books – on history, politics, and several books of sketches in addition to the Sam Slick series. Sam Slick was the Yankee clock peddler whom Haliburton created in 1835 and kept before the reading public for the next 20 years.

Haliburton’s creation of the Yankee clock peddler in the columns of the Novascotian newspaper in 1835-36, the publication by Joseph Howe of a book version on the sayings and doings of Sam Slick in 1837, and the subsequent piracy of the book in England, created an overnight sensation. Sam Slick became a household name. There were Sam Slick pens, a Sam Slick magazine, and Sam Slick impersonators on the English and American stage.

Haliburton’s English readers liked Sam Slick because “they thought (he) was an accurate representation of the kind of brash individual who thrived in the new democracy of America. Americans disputed the likeness vigorously Because Slick was from Connecticut, Haliburton invented a Yankee dialect for him that many of his English readers (but few of his American ones) mistook for an authentic vernacular.”

Which leads to a point Prof. Davies made during his presentation. Windsor proudly proclaims itself as “the home of Sam Slick,” which you can see on a prominent roadsign as you approach the town. Slick’s fictional home was in Connecticut and the sign really should read, “The home of Thomas Chandler Haliburton.”

However, even Haliburton was confused about who Sam Slick was. Prof. Davies says that Haliburton and Slick became more alike as time went on. Haliburton once signed an autograph, “I am Sam Slick, at least what is left of me.”

Did Haliburton create the witty proverbs attributed to him? (Such as “A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse.”) Prof. Davies says no. Haliburton popularised but did not invent them, Davies says, noting that the proverbs Slick made famous can be traced back a long way.

Leon Barron’s mind is like a computer. Ask the North Alton man about the railroad period in this region and with little hesitation he can endlessly recount lore, statistics, and trivia.

Ivan Smith, Canning, has the same passion for the railroad as Leon Barron. Like Barron he collects railroad lore. The difference is that Barron’s collection is stored in memory and file folders and Smith uses a computer. Smith’s web site (Nova Scotia History Index) has almost anything you might want to know about railroading in Nova Scotia.

Given their expertise, I asked Ivan and Leon for assistance when I prepared the recent column on the old Cornwallis Valley Railway. I received much more information than I could use in one column, so here’s a follow-up with some of the more interesting trivia.

In the previous column, I noted that the Cornwallis Valley Railway ran from Kingsport to Kentville. “Shouldn’t this have been the other way around?” some readers asked, since Kentville was the railroad headquarters? That is, that the C.V.R. ran from Kentville to Kingsport?

Over time people began to think of the C.V.R.. line in this way – as a spur of the Dominion Atlantic Railway that ran north from Kentville to Kingsport. However, the C.V.R. was originally a separate entity. Leon Barron tells me the founders of the C.V.R. seriously considered running the line west to Middleton, rather than to Kentville. This possibility, and stiff competition from the C.V.R. spurred the move by the Windsor and Annapolis Railway to buy out the new line.

Eventually, a line did run west from the C.V.R., the so-called Weston subdivision, which serviced the communities of Northville, Billtown, Lakeville, Woodville, Grafton, Somerset and Weston. Leon Barron thinks this was built around 1912, over 20 years after the C.V.R. line began operation. The Weston line was abandoned years ago but traces of the old rail bed and at least one bridge still remain.

Once the C.V.R. became part of the Windsor and Annapolis Railway, trains started to run daily from Kentville to Kingsport. There were eight stops or stations on the original C.V.R. line – Steam Mill Village, Centreville, Ford Crossing, Sheffield Mills, Hillaton, Canning, Pereau and Kingsport. The station at Aldershot Camp was added later (no date known). The so-called “Ford Crossing” is known today as Gibson Woods. No one could tell me why the Ford Crossing was so named.

I mentioned in last week’s column that the C.V.R. was fueled by apples (figuratively speaking) and there were at least 25 warehouses along the line. Leon Barron tells me that when the Weston subdivision was added, another 19 apple warehouses were constructed along the line from Centreville to Weston – further proof that Cornwallis Valley’s apple orchards figured prominently in the railroad’s growth.

A note from Ivan Smith on the C.V.R.’s passenger service: “In autumn, 1936, there was a level of passenger service on the C.V.R. which is today hardly credible. Two trips each weekday, Kentville to Weston and return, and two more Kingsport to Kentville and return. On Saturdays, three trips Kingsport to Kentville and return.”

It’s a convoluted tale but the C.V.R. became part of the Windsor and Annapolis Railway, which later acquired the Yarmouth and Annapolis Railway, and renamed itself the Dominion Atlantic Railway. While it was short-lived, the little C.V.R. became part of a railroad system that eventually ran uninterrupted throughout the length of the province.

The old Cornwallis Valley Railway, which ran from Kingsport to Kentville with eight stops along the way, in one sense was fueled by apples and farm produce.

Started by private interests in 1889, the C.V.R. apparently was built mainly with the apple industry and farmers in mind. From Kingsport the C.V.R. track to Kentville ran for 13.59 miles through the farm communities of Steam Mill, Centreville, Gibson Woods, Sheffield Mills, Hillaton, Canning and Pereau; according to railroad history buff, Leon Barron, the line was dotted with apple warehouses, 25 laying next to the tracks with numerous other storage barns and an evaporator for apples close by.

While the C.V.R. ran to Kentville every day except Sunday, making the trip twice on weekdays and three times on Saturday, providing a passenger service must have been the least of its interests. In her history of the Dominion Atlantic Railway, Marguerite Woodworth writes that in the late 1800s “the fertile district between Kingsport and Kentville, which up to the present had depended for transportation of its produce on the small vessels calling at Kingsport and Canning, or by team to the railroad in Kentville, began to agitate for a railway of its own.”

That agitation came to a head on January 8, 1887, when at a public meeting at Canning it was decided that a rail line from Kingsport, “passing westward through Cornwallis to join with the (existing) railway at some point west,” was a necessity. The proposed line had the backing of Leander Rand, M.P.P, and officers of the Windsor and Annapolis Railway (W. & A.) which hoped the new line would have its terminal point in Kentville.

Several months later (Woodworth gives the date as May 3) the Cornwallis Valley Railway Company Ltd. was incorporated, the federal government granting the line a subsidy of $3,200 per mile and right of way. Government engineers did the groundwork that summer and by June 1889 work on the C.V. R. began in earnest. The location of the C.V.R.’s terminal was still undecided. The C.V.R. was built with the idea that one of the existing railways in the region would eventually take it over. “While no official announcement was made,” Woodworth notes, “a tentative understanding was reached with Mr. King (of the W. & A.) and the construction consequently proceeded toward Kentville.”

By December in 1890 the Cornwallis Valley Railway was in full operation. The C.V.R. rented equipment and terminal facilities at Kentville from the W. & A. and began competing with it immediately. The C.V.R.’s line ran to the government wharf at Kingsport, where steamers from New Brunswick docked, and it soon had the lion’s share of freight traffic. This situation quickly triggered an offer by the shareholders of the W. & A. to buy out the C.V.R. The transfer was made on July 26, 1892; the little C.V.R. may have had the shortest period of operation of any railroad in Canada.

It’s odd that while it ceased to exist in name after a few years of operation, as late as the 1960s railroad men were still referring to the run to Kingsport as the C.V.R. line. The line served the region known as the Cornwallis Valley for over half a century; most of the tracks were removed in 1962.

In 1993 all that remained of the original C.V.R. line were several miles of track running to Steam Mill Village; these tracks were torn up in October, 1993. All that remains of the little C.V.R. today are memories, a few photographs, and scattered remnants of the old right of way.

I suggested in a column several weeks ago that it might have been coined by Nova Scotian woodsworkers, but this is incorrect; it appears that the lumbering expression, snig, is a legitimate word after all.

A note from a reader informed me that snig can be found in the Oxford Dictionary and it referred to wood-cutting activities. I found a volume of the Oxford English Dictionary at Acadia University and confirmed that snig is there; several definitions of the word were given and one – to drag a heavy load, especially timber, by means of ropes and chains – is the meaning commonly used here. The unabridged edition of the Random House Dictionary also contains snig with one definition only, the wood-cutting activity.

Snig, by the way, also refers to a young or small eel, an avaricious person and it also means to steal. Its origin is obscure, says the Oxford Dictionary, noting that in Canada, Northern England, Australia and New Zealand it commonly refers to wood-cutting activities. It’s possible that snig originated first as a reference to eels; their sinuous movement in the water and a similar movement of logs being dragged on the ground may have been observed and applied to this activity.

Several readers told me that snig is (or was) an oft-used word, among them Fen Wood, a longtime mill operator in Coldbrook. I suspect that snig, in the sense that Nova Scotians use it, is one of those “dying words,” a victim of urbanization and education.

My thanks to the reader who steered me to the Oxford Dictionary; I’d mention the writer’s name but I couldn’t decipher the signature on the note.

A belated acknowledgment of a letter from Kimberley Chute, Washington. Ms. Chute wrote to comment on the June 26, July 3 columns on the old Benjamin Mill in White Rock. Ms. Chute is the proud possessor of a painting of the mill by Raleigh Eagles. The late Mr. Eagles, who grew up in the White Rock area when the mill was at the peak of its operation, was the source of my information for the columns. The columns were based on talks with Mr. Eagles in the 70s.

Ivan Smith, Canning writes via e-mail to comment on the recent column on Murrille Schofield. “As you know, he (Schofield) collected a great deal of historical information about the Nova Scotia Light & Power Company, and its predecessors and antecedents,” Mr. Smith noted. “Fortunately, that collection found its way into the Public Archives of NS (and) it appears to be complete and intact.”

Mr. Smith said he hopes that eventually the Public Archives will be persuaded to place Schofield’s material on the Internet so it will be available to everyone. “There’s a huge amount of historical material there,” Smith said. “(Schofield) did us a special service in collecting this stuff, much of which would by now have vanished without his intervention.”

Readers who may remember Kentville’s police chief of the 30s, Rupert Davis, are asked to share their recollections with us. As I mentioned here before, I would like to devote a column to Mr. Davis. However, information is difficult to come by. I have Mr. Davis’ obituary, the report on his tragic accident and the brief account Mabel Nichols used in her book, The Devil’s Half Acre. Surely there is more, such as personal remembrances. Readers who remember Chief Davis are asked to contact me. I can be reached by writing this paper or telephoning [902-]678-4591. My e-mail address is [edwingcoleman@gmail.com].

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.