I erred in my column of April 26 on why Nova Scotians are called Bluenoses. I used the term “Bluenosers” twice in the column and this is incorrect. Wolfville historical writer L. S. Loomer recent wrote to set the record straight, pointing out that the right term is Bluenoses.

“No! We are no more Bluenosers than we are Nover Scotians,” Mr. Loomer wrote. “It is doubly insulting when people can not get a traditional insult spoken and spelled correctly. We are Bluenoses.

“As you mentioned, potatoes were bluenoses before people were. Dorothy Duncan, who wrote a book she entitled Bluenose, a Portrait of Nova Scotia (Toronto, Collins, 1946) also mentioned the potatoes but really dodged the subject by recounting an unlikely explanation from Sir Charles G. D. Roberts. Earlier than John F. Masters potato commentary, there was Ruth Wood’s The Tourist’s Maritime Provinces (1915). On page 104 she states:

‘In his preface to The Old Judge, or Life in a Colony (American edition, 1849) Haliburton accounts for the derivation of the term Blue Nose as applied to Nova Scotians. He affirms it to be a sobriquet acquired from a superior potato of that name…. In confirmation of this theory we have an old invoice which records the shipment to Boston in the year 1787 of a consignment of potatoes which consisted in part of roses and blue noses. The name is given to all Nova Scotians but especially says another writer to that portion of the population descended from pre-Loyalists, that is, those who emigrated from New England before and during the Revolutionary War, as distinguished from those who came after it.’

“Both Grolier’s Encyclopaedia Canadiana and Hertig’s Canadian Encyclopaedia are wrong in stating that the application to people originated with T. C. Haliburton. It did not, as Ms. Wood mentions.

“I can not cite chapter and verse, but I seem to recall that the Rev. Jacob Bailey, a Loyalist refugee in Annapolis, probably in the 1780s, mentioned the derogatory use applying to pre-Loyalists or Planters. The early settlers referred to the Loyalists as refugees in much the way that the abbreviation DP (displaced person) was in use after the Second World War. The Loyalists retaliated by calling the early settlers Bluenoses after the potatoes.”

Continuing on, Mr. Loomer notes that Haliburton used the word Bluenoses numerous times in his books to refer to the old settlers and to Nova Scotians in general, not once spelling the term with an r.

“The misspelling ‘Bluenoser’ seems to be very recent. The earliest I noticed this misspelling was in the Daily Noser, that newspaper of recent origin in Halifax, which deliberately and constantly misspells the word. The misspelling may be an imported Uppity Canadian perversity, or it may be genuinely Haligonian.

“Evidence appears to show clearly that the traditional anti-Planter word is Bluenose (with or without the capital and usually with Haliburton’s hyphen. Let’s keep it that way.”

In 1887 the summer edition of a Valley newspaper listed 234 sailing ships that were built in Kings and Hants County between 1880 and 1886.

While it only covers a few years in the long period when sailing ships were the main mode of travel and commerce, this list gives a glimpse of the “age of sail” and an indication of the importance of seafaring and shipbuilding.

While surfing the Internet recently I came across another reference to the importance of sailing ships in Nova Scotia’s history. “In 1875,” it read, “Nova Scotia, one of the largest seafaring and shipbuilding communities on the ocean, had 2,787 vessels on its registers. With diverse communities clinging to a rugged coastline… Nova Scotians reached out to the horizons in sloops, schooners, brigs, clipper ships and iron-hulled steamers.”

This quote, which is from one of many sites dedicated to Nova Scotia history, gives us another glimpse of the province in the heyday of sailing ships. Many of those 2,787 ships sailed out of ports here in the Minas Basin. And while no accurate account exists that I’m aware, it’s probably safe to say that hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of ships once sailed out of this region, carrying cargo for destinations around the world.

For many of the ships that sailed from Minas Basin ports, there are tales of tragedy, hardship and shipwrecks. In an e-mail note to me several months ago, historian Dan Conlin, curator of the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, wrote that Nova Scotia has a “staggering number of shipwrecks, over 10,000 by conservative estimates.”

Conlin said that some reliable estimates go as high as 25,000 shipwrecks along Nova Scotia’s coast. “Our earliest shipwreck dates back to 1583,” he wrote, “and we have several hundred wrecks from the 18th century, such as the remarkable collection of large warships sunk at Louisbourg during the two sieges there.”

The 1583 shipwreck Conlin referred to is undoubtedly the Delight, destroyed during a storm at Sable Island during the exploratory voyage of Sir Humphrey Gilbert. Conlin calls this the earliest shipwreck, meaning perhaps the first of any note that was recorded. According to several accounts, there are records of over 300 ships going aground on Sable Island; how many the shoals at Sable Island actually claimed will never be known.

Recently the tiny sailing vessel found in the mud in Wolfville harbour made the news. Perhaps incorrectly, this was referred to as a shipwreck. It’s possible the ship may have been set adrift and deliberately scuttled after catching fire at the wharf. I’m assuming that a “shipwreck” is a vessel that has sunk or has broken up on the shore after coming out second best during a storm.

It’s difficult to imagine that there may have been as many as 25,000 shipwrecks in Nova Scotia alone. However, we’re looking at a period of several centuries so it’s possible that this estimate is smack on. Conlin pointed out that the largest number of shipwrecks occurred in the period 1850 to 1950 “when shipping was at its peak.” It’s worth remembering, Conlin said, that shipwrecks still happen today, “not as frequently as in the past, but dozens every year large and small in our waters.”

Many of the shipwrecks on our coast have gone unrecorded and except perhaps for oral records passed from family to family, their stories have never been told.

“There’s a lot of history there, and most people will find them interesting if they take the time to look,” Maynard Stevens says of the old cemeteries in this area.

Stevens was responding to a favourable observation I’d made about his recent book, Where they Rest in Peace, published last November by Gaspereau Press. In the book, Stevens writes about seven cemeteries in Kings County, in the process including some interesting history about the people buried in them.

This is what I found delightful about Stevens’ book. It may be billed a guided cemetery tour but it’s really about some of our early settlers and pioneers, the people who played various roles in shaping the commercial and agricultural fabric of Kings County. In Lower Horton cemetery, for example, stands an obelisk marking the resting place of some the Borden family, Planters whose influence “extended not just throughout Nova Scotia but to Canada as a whole.”

And in Wolfville’s Old Burying Ground are the DeWolfs and Bishops, two of the most influential families in Kings County. As he tours the cemeteries, Stevens writes about the first DeWolfs and Bishops, the first Chipmans, Fullers, Websters, Denisons and other leading families, including mini-biographies of many of the area’s leading figures. If you are curious about the Planters and Loyalists who played prominent roles in our formative years after the expulsion of the Acadians, Stevens book will surely satisfy that curiosity.

But while the biographical sketches of our early historical figures are interesting to read, I enjoyed most the odd facts and figures that Stevens managed to unearth (no pun intended) about the people buried in the old cemeteries. Like me, you may find your curiosity aroused by the little-known fact that slavery existed in Kings County and more than one prominent Planter and Loyalist was a slaveholder. For the most part, historians who glorify our early leading settlers ignore the slavery issue; Stevens’ work is one of the few histories to mention it.

Stevens tells us about the intriguing “Horton Carver” and “Second Horton Carver,” the men whose headstone carvings stand guard over many gravesites in Kings County cemeteries. In the Chipman Corner cemetery is the gravesite of Captain John Huston (1710-1795). Stevens writes of Huston’s close connection with Sir Brook Watson, Lord Mayor of London from 1796 to 1797. There’s the story of Elkanah Morton Jr. who may have been the first male child born to the Planters in Kings County.

These and other stories of historical interest are found throughout the book. “You may pause and consider for a moment all the history buried here,” Stevens writes at the conclusion of one cemetery tour. Considering all the history that is found in his book, I recommend it to anyone the least bit interested in the Planter and Loyalist periods.

Maynard Stevens tells me he has always been interested in cemeteries and the history that lies within them. He first started to collect information on Kings County cemeteries some 15 years ago, “as a summer project with my wife,” and worked seriously on his book a year before it was published. He writes that his book is an introduction to the “rich history found in the cemeteries of Kings County,” intimating that he has barely scratched the surface and there are many more tales to be told. Hopefully, Stevens will continue his research and offer us more cemetery tours.

Stevens book is available at the Kings County Museum in Kentville.

A few months after it opened on June 8, 1855, the Nova Scotia Railway locomotive, along with the tender and two baggage cars, was derailed when colliding with a horse. Reporting on the incident, the Nova Scotian said that none of the 30 passengers on the train, and apparently none of the crew, had been injured.

In her Dominion Atlantic Railway history, Marguerite Woodworth said this was the first railway accident in the province. Describing the “Iron Horse” as rushing “over the unfenced right-of-way sometimes at 40 miles an hour, (and) pulling up at each station with a grinding screech of brakes,” Woodworth gave the impression that it was only matter of time before an accident such as the derailment occurred

There would be accidents more tragic on the railway in future and the derailment in September, 1855, was in a sense prophetic. All through its history, the railway would be plagued by accidents caused by collisions with cows and horses that wandered onto the tracks.

For the most part, Woodworth’s history deals with the railway’s financing and construction. There are many details on the efforts to finance and build the various early lines that would one day amalgamate into the Dominion Atlantic Railway. But along the way Woodworth adds what journalists call “colour” and the “human angle.” The struggle with the elements, for example, among them the near disastrous effects on the line of the Saxby Gale and the great winter storm of 1905.

One of the first fatalities during the building of the railway occurred in 1857 at St. Croix near Windsor. “Two men had been killed when an embankment caved in,” Woodworth said, adding nothing more than that the accident caused labour problems. Apparently, the 1855 derailment caused more concern than the death of men working on the line since no details are given on what would have been a great tragedy in those times.

Thanks to railway buff Leon Barron I have details of two accidents on the railway. From Leon comes a clipping from the Wolfville Acadian of a fatal accident in 1890 at Cambridge. “A very sad accident has cast a gloom over this place,” the Acadian reports reads. “As the freight train from Halifax on Friday last was coming in, Mason Condon attempted to board the engine as it was passing the station. Unfortunately his foot slipped and he fell upon the track immediately behind the engine. Five cars passed over the poor fellow before the train could be stopped.”

After giving the gory details of the accident and reporting on the funeral, the Acadian wound up with a glowing report on how Cambridge was thriving, thanks to the railway.

Another clipping courtesy of Leon Describes an accident similar to the 1855 derailment. This derailment took place near Berwick in 1885 and was caused by a cow wandering on the track. Leon gave me a copy of a letter published in the Berwick Register in 1935 in which an eyewitness describes the derailment. There were no fatalities but a passenger on the train lost both limbs. The letter writer, one Addy Nichols, wrote a detailed description of the incident.

Accidents such as the Cambridge fatality and the derailment east of Berwick hardly caused a blip in operation of the railway. Much more serious was the delay and financial losses caused by the Saxby Gale and other high tides in the fall of 1869. The Gale wiped out tracks between Kentville and Horton; the tracks were destroyed again when unusually high tides swept along the Minas Basin shore weeks after the Gale subsided.

“As you can tell I’ve had occasion to examine the Trecothic/Trecothick land in Horton Township in some detail,” Kentville lawyer Geoffrey Muttart said in a recent letter commenting on my April 12 column.

Mr. Muttart’s letter included his findings at the Registry of Deeds on the Trecothic land. This is a detailed history of various transactions involving the Trecothic property from 1767 to 1966. Horton Township is one of two original divisions of land in this area; and in tracing ownership of a piece of it through two centuries, Mr. Muttart sheds some interesting light on local history.

“In 1767, Joseph Gray mortgaged to Barlow Trecothic 400 acres of upland in Horton Township… together with other lands,” Muttart writes at the beginning of his account. “I believe some of the other lands were at Windsor.”

In 1774, Muttart continues, Gray mortgaged to Trecothick “74 Third Division Farm Lots in Horton Township as collateral for a debt.” Both mortgages must have been foreclosed, Muttart says, explaining how Trecothick obtained ownership of land in the Horton Township. Joseph Gray is undoubtedly the Joseph Gerrish Gray mentioned in Eaton’s Kings County history. Eaton writes that Gray is one of the “Halifax men” who had “influence with the government” and was given free land in Horton.

Continuing the account, Muttart said that in 1774 the four spinster daughters of the deceased James Trecothic conveyed land at Windsor and “all other lands tenements and hereditaments in Nova Scotia” to Baronet Barlow Trecothic, Sir Archibald Edmonstone, Neil Benjamin Edmonstone and Rev. John Hodgson. Mr. Muttart said he could find nothing in the Registry that show how James Trecothic obtained land in Kings County. Further, he says that Baronet Trecothic is not the same Barlow Trecothic who dealt with Joseph Gray.

On the deaths of Baronet Trecothic in 1862, Hodgson in 1870 and Sir Archibald Edmonstone in 1871, Neil Benjamin Edmonstone became sole owner of the Trecothic land. On his death in 1872 the property passed to his wife. In turn, she conveyed the property to Thomas Bolton, Rev. Charles Welland Edmonstone, George Harris Hodgson and Harry Wilmot Lee. In yet another twist in this convoluted record of land transactions, these gentlemen in turn sold a farm in Wolfville and apparently the remainder of the Trecothic land in Kings and the Windsor area to John Wesley Elderkin and James Lovett Bishop in 1877.

The story becomes even more complicated and I’ll let Mr. Muttart tell it: “Third Division farm lots in Horton Township appear to have been treated as part of the conveyance to Elderkin and Bishop; in 1885 they conveyed four such lots… on Gaspereau Lake plus three others to Brenton H. Dodge (a merchant from Kentville who was active in the timber trade). Elderkin and Bishop also conveyed what was described as Trecothic land in Horton Township to a land surveyor… Archibald Bishop.”

By 1901 most of the Trecothic lands that weren’t farms were owned by the Nova Scotia Electric Light Co. Ltd (later changed to the Nova Scotia Light and Power Company and eventually NS Power Inc). This company, which was formed in 1899 to generate hydroelectricity and carry on a general lumbering, also acquired the lumbering business of S. P. Benjamin Ltd. at White Rock and about 30,000 acres of land in the west part of Horton Township and Lunenburg County.

In 1952, NS Power sold the Trecothic lands to Minas Basin Pulp and Power Co. Ltd., who in turn conveyed the land to Scott Paper Co. in 1966.

We’ve all heard the same stories about why we’re called Bluenosers: One legend has it that Nova Scotia fishermen wore hand dyed sweaters and mittens that left a blue stain on the nose when it was wiped with a sleeve or hand. Another legend connects the famous racing schooner, Bluenose, with our sobriquet; other stories says we’re so named because of our cold climate or because of an old potato variety.

In 1930 this newspaper reprinted an article from a Boston daily by a Valley native, John F. Masters, who says our nickname did indeed come from a potato. “Why Are We Bluenoses?”, was written by Masters in his capacity as historian of the Canadian Club of Boston.

In 1844 New England crops were hit by a disease that destroyed most of the potatoes. “The people here were in desperate straits,” Masters wrote, “and as a consequence… every available potato that could be shipped from Nova Scotia was brought to Boston.

“When I was a boy in the Annapolis Valley years ago, some men were called ‘potato kings’ (Jacob Walton in particular) owing to the great quantity of potatoes they handled. Now, some of you may say, ‘What have potatoes to do with Bluenose?’ Well, this is the answer:

“The varieties of potatoes grown in Nova Scotia 75 and more years ago were Early Rose, Breezes Prolific and varieties of Calicoes. A peculiar feature about them being that they were streaked through with blue or calico color. A popular variety of the latter was called the Bluenose potato.

“The Bluenose was the best seller for it was a long, large potato, deep set eyes, with one end blue or calico coloured. Consequently, when it was found that the Boston dealers preferred the Bluenose potato, everyone began to raise it. Sailing vessels for many years came here loaded down with this succulent viand and in such quantities that as a result… the name Bluenose became attached to the people who brought them.

Of course, this was before the large migration of Nova Scotians to New England, but the name has somehow stuck, although it’s not as commonly used as it used to be.

“The Dominion Atlantic Railway many years ago put on a new train between Halifax and Yarmouth and called it the Flying Bluenose (and it is still running every summer) so as to perpetuate and preserve the popular name. And as Nova Scotians as a rule… do not mind the term at all but rather take pride in it, somewhat as the average New Englander likes to be called a Yankee.

“Judge Haliburton, who by the way was the original American literary humorist and a Nova Scotian, used the word often in his inimitable style, so it was in vogue 100 years ago.

“Just where the Bluenose potato originated no one exactly knows, but no doubt it was first raised in New England and the seed taken to Nova Scotia by the New England Planters. One thing is certain: It was raised very generally in Nova Scotia 100 years ago and if you, gentle reader, happen to be travelling any summer through the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia, pause to view the scenery and visit the farms on top of the North Mountain; you will find the Bluenose potato still being grown.”

A great tale with one flaw. Nova Scotia was hit with a potato blight the same time as New England and potatoes were extremely scarce here in the year Masters mentions – 1844.

When Henry Youle Hines wrote about an old burial ground in Hants County, he included a great deal of history about Acadian settlements in the Canard area of Kings County. A. W. H. Eaton’s seminal work, the history of Kings County published in 1910, also contained numerous references to areas that today lie within Hants County.

This may be puzzling to anyone not familiar with the period when Nova Scotia was divided into five counties. Kings was one of the original five counties and much of what is Hants County today was part of it. The province was divided into five counties in 1759, Annapolis, Kings, Cumberland, Lunenburg and Halifax; Hants County was established in 1781.

There were several reasons for breaking up Kings County. Firstly, the county was simply too large. Government records from 1781 note that the distance from the shiretown of Horton and the inconvenience of crossing the tidal Avon River to transact county business were factors in establishing Hants County. Keep in mind that in the 18th century most roads were rough trails and travel on land was by foot or horseback.

As I mentioned, the references by Hines and Eaton are puzzling if one is unaware that Kings and Hants were once a single county. Another history book, a work on the Minas Basin region by W. C. Milner, would also be puzzling if one wasn’t aware of this. I wrote about Milner’s book in my last column. I’ve be re-reading the hundred or so pages I photocopied from a library copy and it’s interesting to see how this region was governed before Kings County was split and Hants County didn’t exist.

“In 1759, four years after the removal of the Acadians,” Milner wrote in an overview, “the government at Halifax divided the province into five counties…. The immigration from New England colonies had not yet commenced; Kings (County) had no settled population except at Horton, and it was arranged that those hailing from Kings could vote at Halifax for the coming elections.

“There were no sheriffs for many years after and the Provost Marshall was authorized to appoint deputy presiding officers. The counties were each allotted two members, the townships twelve. Apparently, Kings sent two members, John Burbidge and Isaac Deschamps.

“Two organizations took charge of the civil affairs of the county – the town meetings and the court of sessions. The township books of Horton and Cornwallis are still in existence but the sessions record book up to the year 1812 is missing from the county records at Kentville.”

Milner laments the loss of the sessions record books which he said were “full of interesting information respecting schools, roads, poor and proceedings for petty misdemeanours” in Kings/Hants. In consequence, Milner wrote, “a vast amount of information respecting the proceedings and acts of the forefathers of the present generation is unknown to them.”

This overview is confusing since Milner in a few sentences jumps from the period before the Planters arrived to the time when the governing of Kings/Hants was in the hand of early Planter settlers. Milner places John Burbidge and Deschamps in the province before the Planter, yet it appears that the former arrived with them.

A check in Eatons Kings County history cleared up this confusion. On page 83 Eaton writes that some of the extra lots in Cornwallis township were “given to Halifax men who had been for a few years in the province, and who had influence with the government, as for example Messrs. John Burbidge and William Best, who settled in the county.”

The title of the section – “The Trecothic Property – was intriguing. I found it in W. C. Milner’s book, The Basin of Minas and its Early Settlers, and the word “trecothic” puzzled me; what did it mean?

According to the title page, Milner’s history ran as a series in the old Wolfville newspaper, The Acadian, before being bound up in book form. This is one of the most interesting histories I’ve ever come across and I’d like to know more about the author. I read the book decades ago at the library and attempts to purchase a copy have been unsuccessful.

Anyway, back to that section with the intriguing heading about the Trecothic property. “The Trecothic property has quite an interesting history,” Milner wrote. “In 1759, four years after the expulsion of the Acadians, the government issued a grant of the township of Horton, 100,000 acres, extending from the Pisiquid to the Habitant River.”

This massive grant was surrendered. Milner said, and a second grant was issued in 1761 “over practically the same territory.” This apparently was the Horton township, which was subdivided into lots and settled by Planters.

I should explain here that I had photocopied sections of Milner’s book and any further explanation of the “Trecothic Property” was not in them. I assumed at first that Trecothic was a geological term or had some connection with paleontological eras – a silly assumption as I later discovered. I couldn’t find the word in the Oxford Dictionary or the encyclopaedia; and as is becoming more common today when looking for information, I then went to Internet search engines.

I believe it’s safe to state that nowadays anything you want to know has been posted by someone on the Internet. I can’t say that when I entered “Trecothic” in the Ask Jeeves search engine that I immediately had an explanation for the word. But by a roundabout route Ask Jeeves eventually lead me to information that explained Trecothic and added to my historical knowledge of this area.

When I posted Trecothic on Jeeves the Trecothic Creek and Windsor Railway of Hants County came up. I inquired at this site and an immediate reply from Glenn Wallis lead me in another direction, a historical search. Mr. Wallis wrote that Trecothic Creek was “named after a military person and landowner.”

I can’t tell you how many historical websites I looked at and how many links I followed before I found that someone named Trecothic had received the original Horton township grant, or what became the grant, of some 100,000 acres in 1759. You won’t find mention of Trecothic in your history books. In his Kings County history, for example, A. W. H. Eaton gives detail after detail on the settlement of local townships but fails to mention that one Trecothic held the original grant.

On the Internet, however, an obscure New England site gives details on the settlement of the Horton township, confirming that a gentleman named Trecothic did indeed exist. Here are two quotes from the site regarding division of land in the Horton township: “In 1873, Medeline Eleanor Edmonstone, heiress to the Trecothic estate, conveyed to Thomas Bolton and others the property she inherited.” And: “In 1774 Joseph Gray mortgaged 74 lots to Barlow Trecothic for 770 pounds, nine shillings. Mr. Foster mortgaged his lots to Mr. Trecothic, who thereby became their owner.”

None of this tells us who Trecothic was but I hope to have more on him in a future column.

“I’ve been told he would climb a tree, get on a roof or wherever he could to get an angle he wanted,” Virginia Atkinson wrote when reminiscing about photographer Amos Lawson Hardy. Atkinson remembered that Hardy was meticulous about details, almost to the point of fussiness, and would go to extremes to get the photograph he wanted.

A. L. Hardy (1860-1935) may not be the greatest or best-known photographer to come out of the Annapolis Valley, but thanks to his striving for good pictures, we have a wonderful and unique photographic heritage.

Hardy was in a singular position. He worked with his camera in a period when the age of sail was winding down, the railway was relatively new, and the first automobiles appeared on roads where horse and oxen were still king. This was a time of major social and economic changes, due mainly to the railway and the automobile; and we are fortunate that Hardy was there to photograph a time vanishing almost as fast as he could capture it on film.

I remember the first time I saw a Hardy photograph. It was a Dominion Atlantic Railway scene, a train station built when Hardy was a boy of nine. Several years after I fist saw this photograph the station was torn down. Thankfully, Hardy captured an image of the old station. But for his photograph, no record of the building would exist today.

This is one reason why Hardy’s work is invaluable and should be cherished. Imagine that Hardy had never existed to capture the images of his time. What if he had never walked dusty village streets, roamed the countryside, or travelled up and down the Valley on the railway and looked at everything with a photographer’s eye?

We have only to look at Hardy’s work to see what we would have lost: Images of Valley towns in the 1890s and early 1900s with horses and carriages, people in quaint clothing and stores where our great grandparents might have shopped. Images of the countryside, the dykes, harbours, orchards and other scenery that has vanished or been changed by wind, tides and man’s meddling. Images of the railway line, men, buildings and rolling stock that are now long gone.

A. L. Hardy’s headquarters was in Kentville. His former home still stands on Webster Court but the buildings housing his studios, three in all, have disappeared. Hardy worked out of Kentville from about 1892 to 1935 and was for a time employed as the official photographer for the Dominion Atlantic Railway. At least one tourist booklet featuring Hardy photographs was published by the railway. And Hardy himself published an album of his favourite photographs.

Hardy must have looked upon the Kentville of his time as worthy of recording. Extant are numerous Kentville scenes, early hotels such as the Kentville, Lyons, McLeods and the Aberdeen, later renamed the Cornwallis Inn. There are Hardy street scenes, Aberdeen and Main, with old stores, early churches, halls and the houses of prominent 19th-century citizens.

Many of these historic photographs are in the files of the Kings County Museum, and many more are in private collections. Virginia Atkinson’s recollections of Hardy are also on file in the museum.

The column on Starr Skates (January Advertiser and Hants Journal) brought a letter from a reader who says she may have ties with the old Dartmouth manufacturer. Audrey Goucher-Millett of Windsor wrote from her winter residence in Florida with comments about the Starr article and to tell me about her family connection.

“Years ago (in the) 1930s when in Halifax with my father, he would make sure he showed our family where Starr Skates were made,” Ms. Goucher-Millett wrote. “The old, long low buildings were in Dartmouth and a large name, Starr Skates, was across the side of the factory.

“My great grandmother, who was Sarah Jane Smallwood, was closely related. Sarah Jane was born in Halifax; her father, Rev. Frederick Smallwood, raised the family outside of Windsor at Pemberton’s Crossing, in a large house on the hilltop above the motel (it is also called Garland’s Crossing).

“My grandmother married Harry Beldon, who was a bookkeeper for the Starr Skate Company. In 1906 Harry accepted the position as the first town clerk for the town of Middleton.

“We were always told we were related to the people who made Starr Skates. It was a connection of my grandmothers and that is all I know. I would love to find out the real connection.”

When she returns to Windsor this spring, Ms. Goucher-Millett said in closing, she plans to visit Howard Dill’s hockey museum to see the pair of Starr Skates mentioned in my column. These skates were donated to the Dill museum by Ruth and Wayne Downey and are now on display there; the skates were used over half a century ago by Ruth Downey’s mother, Agnes Bishop, on ponds in the Grafton area.

The Hibernia Shipwreck

On December 8, 1911, the Hibernia sailed out of Hantsport, bound for Barbados with a cargo of lumber, with Capt. Charles McDade in command. It was her last voyage. The Hibernia disappeared after a series of severe storms swept over the Atlantic a few days after she sailed and it was feared that the schooner and her crew were lost.

Some 29 days after the Hibernia disappeared, word came of a miraculous rescue at sea. The remains of the Hibernia had been discovered drifting in the Atlantic, its crew literally clinging to portions of the ship and barely alive. The battered remains of the Hibernia had been drifting for 29 days and at the moment of rescue the crew had given up all hope.

On April 28 the story of the Hibernia shipwreck will be the topic of a talk at the Kings County Museum. Hantsport historical researcher Garnet McDade, the grandson of Capt. Charles McDade, will present the Hibernia story at the monthly meeting of the Kings Historical Society. The meeting is open to the public.

On May 4 historian Dan Conlin will be the guest speaker at the Fieldwood Society meeting in Canning. Conlin’s topic will be lighthouses of the Maritimes.