Capt. Ray C. Riley of Hantsport is on a crusade.

For decades, Riley has been striving to have Hantsport recognized as the original home of the apple blossom festival; and he may have a point. “The bottom line is that when it comes to the festival, Hantsport was first in holding an apple blossom celebration in the Valley,” Riley said when I talked with him recently. “Kentville was a latecomer and it only took over the festival after it became too big for Hantsport.”

To substantiate this claim, Riley has researched and written a history of Hantsport’s festival celebrations, which began in 1927. The history follows below, but first we should note that no one questions Riley’s statement about Hantsport holding several celebrations with apple blossom themes at least six years before Kentville. Hantsport had its apple blossom queens and its apple blossom balls in the 1920s, just as Kentville did when it started what became a Valley-wide festival in 1933.

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The late Bill Chase must have been driving taxi around town when he realized Kentville had changed drastically since he was a boy; for one thing, many of the stores and houses he remembered had disappeared.

Chase was born in Kentville in 1926 and went to school at Kings County Academy. He operated Star Taxi in Kentville in the 1950s and likely noticed firsthand how the town had changed since his school days. He decided to record those changes and a detailed street map, which he left to a niece, was the result.

Why Chase decided to make a map of Kentville’s retail section as it existed in 1938 is immaterial. But historians such as Kentville’s Louis Comeau are grateful that he did. “The town has changed since the map was created,” Comeau said, “and many memorable buildings aren’t there anymore. Chase puts names on those buildings, pinpoints where they were located, making it a valuable record and a great research tool.”

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Few people today recall that Burns, Palmeter, and Baker are names that once were synonymous with the Apple Blossom Festival. At one time or another, Frank J. Burns, Bob Palmeter and Clifford Baker have been credited with pioneering the festival; all three Kentville men were prominent as organizers during its formative years and all contributed to its early success.

While we don’t know for sure who came up with the idea, we know that in 1933 the Apple Blossom Festival was held in Kentville for the first time and various Valley towns participated. We also know that the format used in summer carnivals hosted in Kentville (1926 and 1928) was adopted by the festival fathers. But the identity of the individual – if it was an individual – who first promoted the blossom festival has been lost.

That said, there are clues to whom this far-sighted person might be. One of the best candidates is Frank J. Burns. He often spoke of the festival as if it was his idea and he said on more than one occasion he started it. Burns played a prominent role on the committee organizing the first festival and was definitely a founding father.

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To most people, Church Street is just that, a street a few miles north of Kentville that was named after a church built there in earlier times.

However, Church Street is a community and is recognized as such in Place Names and Places of Nova Scotia. This book, compiled by Charles Bruce Fergusson and published in 1967, says that Church Street “was so named from Church and Glebe lands on which St. John’s Anglican Church was built.” As early as 1855, Church Street had a postal way station and a school by 1836, all of which established it as a community and not just another county street.

Fergusson ignores the possibility that it was the Acadians who first built a church on the road that eventually became Church Street. This is the accepted folklore.

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When Elmer Skaling purchased a small piece of land on the northwest corner of Exhibition and Cornwallis Street in 1921, he probably didn’t think that the diner he eventually built there would still be serving food decades after he was gone.
Skaling choose the site wisely and with foresight. It’s no coincidence that the place he picked for his diner was on the main route between the military camp at Aldershot and the town of Kentville. The location guaranteed a constant flow of potential customers going by his door and the restaurant flourished in the late 30s to the mid-1950s, the period Camp Aldershot held thousands of soldiers training to go to war.

Today only a few seniors remember Elmer’s but for decades it was one of the most popular lunch counters in Kings County. Skaling opened his doors in 1939 and the diner has the distinction of having serving food on the site for 80 years; few stores, lunch counters, diners or restaurants in Kings County can make this claim; and while it wasn’t unique, Elmers was a step above most dining places in the county. The popularity of the diner, according to stories handed down from people who patronized the store, had a lot to do with his wife Jennie’s home cooking and the specialty of the house, Elmer’s famous chickenburger.

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In his history of Kings County, Arthur W. H. Eaton writes that during the expulsion a few Acadians escaped by hiding in the hills above New Minas. Another historian of note writes in the same vein. In a privately published manuscript (The French Period in Nova Scotia) John Erskine writes that Acadians from Grand Pre avoided expulsion by withdrawing to the woods.

In the Greenwich history, Edythe Quinn writes that some Acadians escaped the expulsion by hiding on the ridge above the village. Like Erskine, Quinn also notes that the Acadians built log huts or a stone house. Local folklore also suggests that the Acadians built a small fort above Greenwich or New Minas while waiting for the French to return. Quinn and Erskine both mention this.

Now despite Eaton, Erskine and Quinn, unsubstantiated folklore is likely all this is. Some Acadians did escape – most gave themselves up after a short stay in the wilds – and perhaps shelters of some sort were erected; but the folktales about an Acadian fort in the hills above Greenwich or New Minas seem far-fetched.

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A landscape photograph a historian says is “an original Edson Graham hand-tinted print” has come to light in Ontario and the antique dealer discovering it believes it belongs back where it came from, the Annapolis Valley.

The print, titled “The Corner Brook,” is an example of the work Wolfville photographer Edson Graham did through the 1920s to the 1940s. The print was brought to my attention by the dealer who contacted me when a Google search brought up columns I wrote about Graham over a decade ago. “I acquired (this) original work of art… hand signed by Edson Graham and it is an amazing photograph,” the dealer wrote. “The print has been well preserved under glass all these years and is in wonderful condition. I knew it was special when I saw the frame it was in.”

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“In the very heart of the Land of Evangeline, beneath the shadow of Blomidon, with a far-stretching strip of golden beach and the orchards extending for miles one every side… nestles the seaside resort of Kingsport. The destiny of Kingsport is very plain – a year or so will see it as fashionable a haunt as any on the New England shores.”

This optimistic prediction of a great future for Kingsport is in a tourist booklet published circa 1893 by the Windsor and Annapolis Railway. With hindsight we know that Kingsport became important when the Cornwallis Valley Railway opened in 1890 (linking its port with Kentville) but it never became the “fashionable haunt” predicted by the railway.

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The fate of the Dominion Atlantic Railway in the Valley was sealed in the late 1980s when highway 101 between Kentville and Yarmouth was completed. Now, decades later, the abandoned railbeds are walking trails and the only visible remnants indicating the railway was once here.

As for other remnants, a few books of railway history have been published, with at least one focusing on the Annapolis Valley. Some museums have token railway displays; only a few, such as the Macdonald Museum in Middleton with its all-encompassing exhibit, celebrates the fact that this was once a railway hub.

Besides museum exhibits, some remnants of the railway also can be found in private collections. Put together by people with a passionate interest in the railway and its lore, these collections are priceless; since they preserve artefacts and historic material that surely would have been lost forever, calling the collections “priceless” doesn’t say enough about their value.

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(Note: Tentative plans are being made to recognize an early Kentville police officer, Rupert Davis. The following account about Davis is based on a column I wrote in 2001 and from information found in the archives of the Kings County Museum).

In the December 26, 1938 issue of The Advertiser, the newspaper reported that Kentville’s former Chief of Police was in critical condition after being struck by an automobile on a town street.

“Rupert Davis, for 45 years Kentville Chief of Police… is in critical condition in Eastern Kings Memorial Hospital, Wolfville”, reads the newspaper report. “Returning to his home on his bicycle, the former Chief, now nearing 80 years of age, was struck by an alleged hit-and-run auto driver. Davis sustained a broken left arm, other injuries and severe shock.”

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