“This diary has been… transcribed to the best of our ability,” write Jean Calkin and Ruth Lloyd, the granddaughters of Shubael B. Burgher. When she gave me a copy to read, Ruth Lloyd said that as well as transcribing the diary faithfully, she and her sister preserved the spelling and grammar of Shubael Burgher. Thus the diary was copied exactly as Shubael wrote it over a period of almost 60 years.

Shubael Burgher began his diary in 1852 when he was 21; his last entry was made in 1910, the year before he died. For the most part, he only wrote a few lines each year. And for the most part, the entries are about farm crops and his work. Like most of his peers, he had little time for school. In fact, it is startling to read in his first diary entry that Shubael received his first schooling when he was age 21.

For most of his life, Shubael Burgher worked on the land. Shubael grew up in a time when the population of Nova Scotia was mainly rural, but he was more than a farmer. Ruth Lloyd told me that Shubael worked at shipbuilding and we find references to this throughout the early part of his diary. Shubael notes that he worked with some of the big names in shipbuilding, the Churchills, Burgesses and Creightons, and in shipyards at Walton, Noel and Kingsport.

Life in the 19th century was one long struggle to survive and everything revolved around the weather and the harvesting of crops. Typical entries in Shubael’s diary refers to the success or failure of vegetable and fruit crops, haying, cutting wood and when there were lulls, working for neighbours in their hayfields and woodlots. Even when he was in his 70s, for example, Shubael was “sawing (wood) for a number of people in Kingsport (and) Canning.” In this quote from a 1903 entry, Shubael adds that he “chop(p)ed some (wood) for George Pineo” and he expected to be chopping as well that winter for William Ells.

Tragic events in Shubael’s life – sickness, death, accidents – are mentioned in a few terse lines along with the good things that happened. In 1868, for example, Shubael’s second son, Joseph, was born, his father died and his house was destroyed in a fire. Shubael records these events along with mention of whom he worked for that year: “Joseph B born 2nd Feb(r)uary. Worked for Jos Dimack Sr. half time and half with Jos. Dimack Jr. My father died. The house burnt we live in.”

During Shubael’s lifetime work began on the wharf that was to make Kingsport a major shipping port in this region. Shubael tells us that he worked on the Kingsport wharf in 1886 and on various dykes in Kings and Hants County, some of which are still standing.

The railroad came to this area in Shubael’s lifetime, the line being completed through the Valley when he was in his 30s. But Shubael doesn’t mention this momentous event, which changed completely the way Valley people worked and lived. However, Shubael worked on the little Cornwallis Valley Railway (CVR) which linked the port of Kingsport with Kentville. The history books (Woodworth’s Dominion Atlantic Railway history) say that work began on the CVR in 1889 but Shubael’s diary has references to railroad work in the autumn of 1888.

Shubael’s diary offers us brief but telling glimpses of 19th-century life and we are fortunate that his family has preserved it. The original of his diary is in the Kings County Museum.

“In like manner… that other Celtic wave of almost equal volume, which has brought us so many valuable settlers from the South and West of Ireland, had scarcely made itself felt beyond the town of Halifax,” D. Allison wrote in 1888.

Allison was commenting on a census taken in 1767. In a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Nova Scotia Historical Society, Allison reviewed the census, noting that nearly as many Irish as Scots had emigrated here. But, he lamented, the Scots had made their presence felt while the Irish role in Nova Scotia has been downplayed.

True or not, there was a period in Nova Scotia when people of Irish origin outnumbered the Scots. According to the 1767 census, for example, the population of Halifax around that time included 835 Irish and only 52 Scots. Even the Acadians outnumbered the Scots in Halifax at the time.

I mention Allison’s because we’re about to mark another St. Patrick’s Day. This Sunday those with Irish ancestors, and those who wish they had, will celebrate with the usual green beer, Irish music and Irish food. The food and music, for the most part, will be Irish in name only, but that’s okay since observing the day is all that really matters.

There has been an Irish presence in Nova Scotia at least since the early 18th century. At the time of the 1767 census nearly 20 percent of Nova Scotia’s population were born in Ireland. Earlier, in 1760, the population of Halifax was approximately 3,000 and one-third were Irish.

Just after the arrival of the Planters, a mini-wave of Irish settlers flowed into the Annapolis Valley. A careful digging around will turn up groups of Irish immigrants who settled in areas along the North Mountain in Kings County, outside the main settled areas in Hants County, and in the outback in Annapolis County. For the most part historians ignore these settlers, apparently because their numbers were small, and perhaps simply because they were Irish and Catholic.

The oral histories of many Annapolis Valley Irish families tell of their ancestors literally being ostracised by their peers. One local history buff found that his Irish Catholic ancestors weren’t welcome on the Valley floor in Kings County, for example, and had to settle on the North Mountain. However, the Irish were welcome as labourers, and many of them pounded spikes when the railway went through the Valley. Typically, those same Irish labourers were involved in a violent fracas between railway workers. Marguerite Woodworth touches on this incident in her history of the Dominion Atlantic Railway, hinting that it may have occurred because Irish workers were resented by other labourers.

Anyway, back to observing St. Patrick’s Day. If you hear the local radio station cranking out those sentimental, romantic and melancholy “Irish” songs on St. Patrick’s Day, chances are you’re not hearing authentic Irish music. Much of what passes as Irish music today comes from British and American music hall productions with Irish themes. Sure, they sing about Irish places, Irish romance and about brawling and drinking, but mostly they’re as Irish as Hank Williams is grand opera.

Irish music more often celebrates nature and the land than it does swilling brew and brawling. In one collection of Irish music published in 1903, for example, the majority of nearly 2,000 tunes are about the land, the seasons and the people. No more than a handful of the tunes are about drinking and fighting.

“The all-pervading topic here, just now, is the Potato Blight. Anxious questions, and doubtful answers are all on the Farmer’s and Villager’s lips, and, as yet, while all dread a general failure, nobody can estimate the extent of the damage. Up until a week ago little was heard of ‘the blight,’ as it had made its appearance in but a few spots – it has now become more general, and in some fields has been sufficiently destructive to justify the most grave apprehensions.”

In a talk at the Kings Historical Society, L. S. Loomer said this terse paragraph from an 1845 issue of the Nova Scotian was an early forewarning of “a disaster, a terrible disaster” that struck Nova Scotia and “continued for several years.”

This disaster was the potato blight of 1845-1846 and the “forewarning” apparently came too late. Two weeks later another letter appeared in the Nova Scotian and it was obvious that the blight was full blown: “The potato disease is much more serious in the Township (Cornwallis) than was anticipated a short time ago… and the potatoes that were dug… have since become useless for man or beast. Persons who had stored potatoes in cellars had found them in such a state of rottenness that they have been obliged to carry them out and cover them up.”

This, Loomer said, was the beginning of two years of hunger and hardship in Nova Scotia “and they may have been the worst such years in recorded history.”

While most of us have heard of the potato famine in Ireland, Loomer said, few know that a similar event occurred in Nova Scotia. And as in Ireland, the widespread suffering during the blight was due to dependence on potatoes.

The blight was widespread, striking every area of the Maritimes, and causing great food shortages. In the Annapolis Valley nearly all the potato crop of 1845 was hit. Farmers in Windsor lost almost 90 percent of their crop. In Cornwallis, reads the report of the Board of Agriculture, “one half of the potato crop is diseased. In Horton “the rot has affected more than three-fourths of their potatoes.”

Farther down the Valley, in the Bridgetown area, farmers lost an estimated seven-eights of the potato crop. Outside the Valley the tale was similar. Lunenburg County farmers suffered potato losses amounting to three-quarters of the entire crop. Halifax County lost nine-tenths of its crop, Digby County two-thirds, and so on around the province.

“The rotting of the Nova Scotia potato crop in October 1845 was to have dire consequences long before the end of the year,” Loomer said, noting that the government took immediate action to counter its effects. “The Nova Scotia Legislature was in session just after the beginning of January 1846. One of the earliest items of business was relief for the victims of this agricultural disaster.”

The relief came in the form of food grants for the stricken areas. The Lieutenant Governor had already distributed thousands of dollars worth of provisions to blight victims and the Legislature moved to do the same. Humane as this may seem, the Legislature also decided that grants for food or seed would be deducted from the annual county road grants.

The potato blight persisted for several years in some areas well after 1845. During the peak of the blight and in following years, fruit and vegetable crops were hit by diseases and destructive insects. The blight’s appearance was the first of a series of farm disasters.

Excerpts from mini-histories of Kentville by Leslie Eugene Dennison and E. J. Cogswell have been featured here off and on since last autumn. The original Dennison article, a review of Kentville in the 1870s, ran in The Advertiser in 1932; Cogswell’s article first ran in the predecessor of The Advertiser, the Western Chronicle, in 1895.

As mentioned before an unknown history buff typeset and edited the Dennison and Cogswell articles, adding footnotes and indices. Thanks to a reader, I have copies of these edited manuscripts. Of the two, Cogswell’s provides the earliest glimpses of Kentville. As can be seen from following excerpts from Cogswell, the Kentville of which he writes was little more than a few streets and a few stores.

“Kentville for a long time consisted of nothing but the old Horton Corner, and was composed of nothing but Main Street or the old military road, and the street from Cornwallis running into it,” Cogswell wrote, adding that the centre of business was DeWolfe’s corner.

Cogswell tells us in his manuscript that he first visited Kentville when he was a boy. “The first time I was in Kentville over 50 years I went with my mother to this old fulling mill,” he writes. This would be around 1845 and the military road Cogswell refers to was undoubtedly the original Acadian road that ran towards Port Royal. The Acadians that settled around Grand Pre and New Minas started this road, which followed an Indian trail, but they never completed it.

Cogswell suggests that Kentville owes its existence to a ford on the Cornwallis River, a ford first used by the Micmacs and later by the Acadians. Kentville had no “Indian name,” Cogswell says, “but it was important even to them as being situated at the principal ford of the Cornwallis River, and the Indian roads or trails seem to converge to, and diverge from that place.”

Cogswell says that Kentville was once the site of an Acadian village. “The first French bridge over the Cornwallis was here near the present (bridge) and not far from the old ford,” he says. If this is true, this would make the area around the Kentville bridge an Acadian historic site; perhaps it is only of minor historic importance but it is a site that should be marked.

Cogswell also mentions an Acadian mill near Kentville. “There was an old French mill here also on the river on what is now Mrs. Lyon’s dyke,” he writes. “The old race can still be traced.”

On the Acadian name for Kentville, Cogswell says that it “must for the present remain in obscurity, for although I have a list of French villages, I can locate but few.”

As well as the ford on the Cornwallis, another factor may have played an important role in Kentville becoming a commercial centre. Cogswell speculates that when Parrsboro was separated from Kings County “by a statute in 1846,” the centre of the county “was thrown farther to the west.” This had the effect of making Kentville, or Horton Corner as it was then called, the geographical centre of Kings County, and supposedly lead to it becoming the shire town.

It seems that Cogswell was a history buff of sorts since in his manuscript he refers often to his research. On the original owners of land in the centre of Kentville, for example, he writes that “the earliest information I can procure (indicates it was) in possession of a Phillis family, and Allisons, Hunts, Dennisons, Biards and others.”

On the evening of December 2, 1920, the second College Hall of Acadia University burned to the ground. Lost in the fire was the working model of an ingenious device made to generate electrical power from the Fundy tides at Cape Split.

The device was the Clarkson Current Motor No. 1, the brainchild of Acadia University engineering professor, Ralph P. Clarkson. Tested by consulting engineers in the Conestoga River in Pennsylvania, the current motor was declared to be one of the most efficient known to man. In later tests in the Gaspereau River the 15-foot current motor again proved its efficiency in generating electric current.

Unfortunately, the grand scheme to use the Clarkson current motor to generate electricity in the Bay of Fundy never came to fruition. From documents I’ve read about the plan, it eventually could have provided enough electrical power for the entire region. At the time, Clarkson’s current motor was proclaimed ideal for generating electricity from the Fundy tides. Later reviews by engineers as recently as 30 years ago also noted that the project had great potential and undoubtedly would have worked. In its February 16 edition in 1917, a provincial newspaper called it “an enormous project and one that cannot be given too much attention.”

So what happened? Why did the plan to harness the Fundy tides fail?

It certainly wasn’t because of the people behind the plan. Some of the brightest brains in this area were partnered with Clarkson on the project, among them Acadia president Dr. G. B. Cutten, Dr. W. L. Archibald of the Acadia business academy and Professor Alexander Sutherland of Acadia’s engineering department. The newspaper referred to above said that the Fundy project was the brainchild of Clarkson and Cutten. Clarkson himself had studied electrical and mechanical engineering at institutes in the United States; before coming to Acadia he had been an industrial engineer, had taught at university and most recently had worked in the U.S patent office where he had been chiefly concerned in the examination of engineering inventions.

When it was first announced, the proposal to generate electricity from the Fundy tides received tremendous local support. The Cape Split Development Company was formed early in 1916 with Cutten as president, Clarkson as vice president and managing director, t. L. Harvey, a former Wolfville mayor, as treasurer, and W. L. Archibald as secretary. The company then raised about $31,000 from the sale of shares, the support coming mainly from Kings County residents.

One of the first steps of the newly formed group was to engage the services of a New York firm of consulting engineers. This firm surveyed Cape Split during the summer of 1916 to determine the best location for the project. The survey revealed that the tide races through the rip at Cape Split at a velocity of over 11 m.p.h. and was the best location for the project.

One would have to be an engineer to fully understand how the Fundy tides would be used in combination with the Clarkson Current Motor to generate power. Basically, the plan was to pump seawater with the Clarkson Motor from the base of Cape Split to reservoirs on the cliffs above. From the reservoirs, water would then be gravity fed through chutes to turbines in a power house at the base of the cliffs.

Apparently, it was the overall cost of the project that killed it. Clarkson and Cutten had estimated that the amount of $2,500.00 would be required to harness the Fundy tides but the hoped for big time financiers, such as Henry Ford, never came through. The company quietly wound up its business in 1929, paying shareholders who had invested the original $31,000 a meagre $4.41 on $50. shares.

I wasn’t exaggerating when I told a friend I probably could write a column a day for several years using information collected by the Kings Historical Society. If anything it was an understatement. The Society’s files in the Old Kings Courthouse Museum contain several centuries of history and a lifetime of column writing couldn’t cover everything in them.

However, since I have a standing invitation to peruse the Society’s files and write about what I find interesting, I’ve decided to do this once or twice a month. Following is the first instalment of an ongoing series from the Society’s history (H) files.

Nova Scotia was once noted as a seafarer’s province and during the age of sail Kings County was well known for shipbuilding. Reading the H files at the Courthouse Museum, I discovered that at one time nearly every seaside community in the county was into shipbuilding. Canning and Kingsport were two of the busiest shipbuilding areas but even ports smaller by comparison had a shipbuilding industry.

Take tiny Scotts Bay, for example. In the H files I discovered that ships were built in Scotts Bay as early as 1895. (And perhaps even earlier according to Scotts Bay residents quoted in the H files). Scotts Bay craftsmen turned out several sailing late in the 19th century. “Three 4-masted barques built in Scotts Bay,” reads the H file “were the Habitant in 1885 in the Jonathan E. Steele yard…. Another was the Scotts Bay, launched in 1885 and captained by George Murray. Also, the Bluebird was built in the Bay.”

Ships were built in Scotts Bay into the 20th century. The H files say that the last ship built in the Bay was a four-masted schooner, the Huntley, which was launched in 1918. According to the H files, an estimated 15 to 20 vessels were built at Scotts Bay.

One would never think that Huntington Point, a few miles up the Bay of Fundy shore from Halls Harbour, would be the site of a shipyard. However, the H files say that at least one sailing ship was constructed at the Point. In 1919, say the H files, “the Bona H was built at Huntington Point by G. B. Hatfield and named for his daughter. This ship was the last to be built in the Halls Harbour area and was lost by fire off the coast of Cuba in 1921.

At least one ship was constructed at Halls Harbour proper, say the H files. This was the 391 ton barque Ella Moore, launched in 1867 and wrecked in Canso 25 years later.

Another unlikely location for a shipyard is the Blomidon shore around so-called Whitewaters and Delhaven. The H files recollections by Cora Woolaver refer to a shipyard “active about 150 years ago” at Mill Creek and said that “there were quite a few ships there.” Ms. Woolaver refers to shipbuilding on the beach and a tugboat being built at Cape Blomidon. Woolaver remembers that the Blomidon shore was an active area and there was a kiln, mill and blacksmith shop.

We usually think only of seaside communities as shipbuilding areas. However, according to the H files, two ships were built on the Cornwallis River at Kentville, which is about half a dozen miles from the ocean. According to the H files, in 1813 a “brig of 200 tons was built by Mr. Handley Chipman on the Cornwallis River near the bridge in Kentville.” Just over three decades later, say the H files, one James Edward DeWolfe built a barque in the same location in 1846. Both ships are mentioned in Eaton’s Kings County history.

Bear Brook is a tributary of the Canard River in the Steam Mill area. I’ve lived here all my life and never heard of a brook by that name. But since Leslie Eugene Dennison mentions it in his 1932 article on growing up here in the late 19th century, it must have been the accepted name for the waterway.

It’s an odd name for a stream. Since it flows through the upper dykelands of the Canard River system and this isn’t bear country, the name likely has no connection with old bruin. However, there was a family with the surname of Bear living here about 100 years ago; I believe this was a native family and they lived in the Steam Mill area, perhaps beside what became known as Bear Brook due to their residency there.

Dennison wrote that a carding mill operated by the Killams was located on or near Bear Brook. (Mentioned in my previous column, Wool and Cotton Warp: 19th Century clothing). New Minas historical writer Marie Bishop called recently with information on the carding mill which her mother remembers quite well. Marie believes this was the mill that was sold by the Killams to the Thurlows. “They (the Thurlows) operated the mill for a few years in the first part of the 1900s,” Marie said, adding that she believes they “sold out around the start of the first world war.”

Marie’s recalled that her grandmother talked of going to the mill to have wool carded. “They also spun wool for people and made wool batts for quilts,” Marie said.

Like me, Marie has never heard of the name Bear Brook for the stream the carding mill was on. The brook ran from a pond – Thurlow’s Pond it was called – into the Canard River. The pond, which is on Camp Aldershot grounds, was once the prime source of courting bouquets. “When my mother was young,” Marie said, “the boys would pick the water lilies that grew in the pond and give them to girls they liked.”

Thurlow’s Pond is also famous – perhaps that should be notorious – for another water plant. The watercress that clogs the Canard River today was first planted in Thurlow’s Pond, introduced it is said by an Englishman who thought the plant would be a welcome addition to the ecology of the area. The plant spread into the Canard River and by the 1930s had clogged the river so badly that landowners hired crews to remove it. The watercress was ripped out of a three or four mile stretch of the Canard from Steam Mill downstream but it was a useless exercise since it quickly grew back again.

Marie Bishop told me that an early map of this area indicates the carding mill was on the edge of Aldershot Camp. Marie surmises that the mill may have ceased operation when the federal government purchased the grounds where the military base is located. With the purchase, the mill may have lost its water source since Thurlow’s Pond would then be on government property.

The map Marie mentioned shows that in the pre-military camp days a public race track or trotting park was located on the Aldershot Camp grounds. The area was also used as a training and exercise ground for the militia, perhaps the Kings Canadian Hussars, before becoming federal property.

Marie said her mother remembers races being held at the track, usually on weekends. On one Saturday her mother’s relatives were watching the races while sitting in their carriage on the sidelines. Apparently, the animal drawing their carriage was a retired race horse. When the starting gun went off, the horse bolted onto the track and circled it several times before it could be stopped.

On a rise beside the highway in Steam Mill, two native children lie in an unmarked grave.

Near Kentville a cemetery at least 200 years old lies untended, its headstones scattered; long in disuse, this burial ground once sheltered the remains of some 30 souls but now is almost forgotten.

In Greenwich near the site of the old Horton township poor farm is another abandoned burial ground. Here Edythe Quinn writes in her Greenwich history were buried the poor farm inmates “who died without relatives or anyone to arrange for burial.”

Near Newtonville, 23 people are buried in a tiny cemetery that was first used in 1890 and saw its last burial in 1936. The forest has claimed this cemetery which holds descendants of some of the first settlers in the Annapolis Valley.

There are many similar burial sites in this area. Like the gravesite of the native children, some are unmarked; and as the years pass and new generations come and go, many have fallen into disuse and are forgotten and neglected.

A search is now underway to locate the burial site of the native children. Efforts will also be made to mark the 200-year-old cemetery and possibly restore some of its lost glory. The burial ground near the old poor farm at Greenwich has already received considerable attention and plans are being made to restore the area and properly mark it.

Some work has already been done at the old Newtonville cemetery. Brush has been removed, headstones have been cleaned, and a freshly painted gate put back in place. Several years ago a trail was blazed into the cemetery and a right-of-way established so descendants of those buried there – mostly Coldwells, Benjamins and Jordans – can visit their ancestor’s resting place. Plans have been made for additional restoration work in the near future.

Behind much of this research and restoration is the recently established Burial Ground Care Society of Kings County. The Society first came to the public’s attention last year when this newspaper reported on their efforts to restore the burial ground adjacent to the Greenwich poor farm. As noted above, some work has been done on the poor farm cemetery. I attended a Society meeting on January 21 and I found that the poor farm cemetery restoration is currently high on the priority list.

The Society deems it important to locate abandoned and neglected burial grounds in the county, such as the poor farm cemetery, and this will be the main object of future activities. As well locating and identifying old burial grounds, the Society’s objective is also to make them “accessible and presentable.” Their mission statement reads as well that the Society will “research and record the history of neglected or abandoned burial grounds in Kings County.”

As someone interested in history I agree with the objectives of the Society. Occasionally I’ve come across old burial grounds in the county, and reading the headstones, I’ve often wondered about their history. Many of the old burial grounds I’ve seen in the back country are in a sad state and its a shame they’ve been neglected and allowed to deteriorate.

The recent interest in old burial grounds is best summed up by Richard Skinner, one of the founders of the Society. History can come alive when one leaves the books and records and visits a gravesite, Skinner wrote in a recent issue of Kings County Vignettes.

When she was a young girl in the Grafton area in the early 1900s, Agnes (Coleman) Bishop probably used her Starr skates on the moonlight skating parties that were common in her day. She must have prized the skates. They were kept in excellent condition and were still in the original box they came in when she passed them on to her daughter, Ruth Downey.

Agnes Bishop’s skates were typical of the sports footwear the old Starr Manufacturing Company had been making in Dartmouth since at least 1864 (one source gives the date as 1865). Early skates were strapped on but in 1864 John Forbes, a shop foreman at Starrs, devised “spring skates” that were clamped onto the soles and heels of boots. Later models screwed onto footwear, one model of this type, the Starr Mercurys, was the kind Agnes Bishop used.

Long Pond in Windsor is known as the birthplace of hockey. Near long Pond is Kings College. John Starr attended Kings College in the 1840s and perhaps watching hurley being played on the ice at Long Pond gave him the inspiration to manufacture skates. What little history exists on Starr says that he became Canada’s first skate manufacturer in 1864. Other records indicate that Starr’s shop foreman, John Forbes, took out a patent for what were called Acme Skates. The Acme model may have been the first skate Starr manufactured. An advertising brochure published by Starr in 1893 refers to this model as being the “genuine Acme.”

That Starr made other models besides the Acme can be seen from an advertising brochure produced in 1893. Listed in the brochure is the Acme in various models, starting at less than dollar a pair. The top of the line Acme models were nickel or silver plated. The very best Acmes were plated in a combination of gold and silver and sold for $5.50 a pair. Starr also produced a special line of hockey skates – “made specially for hockey playing and acknowledged to be the best skate in the market for the purpose” – that sold for $2.60 and $3.40 a pair. The brochure boasted that these skates had been “generally adopted by the leading hockey players in Montreal.”

Starr was also producing racing skates and a line called “skeleton skates” that were made “to be attached permanently to the boot by means of screws.” Another line, the “Star Skate,” was a cut below the Acme models in quality and sold for 65 cents a pair. Starr called it the “cheapest skate on the market,” meaning low in price and not in quality.

On their packing material Starr boasted that their skates were “used the world over.” According to their brochure, the skates had been displayed at world fairs and exhibitions, winning recognition for quality. First prize medals and diplomas were won by Starr at Philadelphia in 1876, Paris in 1878, London in 1886 and Chicago in 1893.

Recently Ruth and Wayne Downey let me examine the pair of Starr skates Agnes Bishop had once used. While the Starrs were primitive compared to the skates available today, they were finely crafted and nickel plated. Looking at them, I couldn’t help thinking that skates like these were used when the first professional players took to the ice in Montreal and when hockey was first played on historic Long Pond.

Agnes Bishop’s Starr skates were recently donated by the Downeys to Howard Dill’s hockey memorabilia museum near Long Pond. Of the skates, Howard Dill says it’s “almost unbelievable to see a pair still in the box they came in.”

(This is the fourth look at the reminiscences of Leslie Eugene Dennison, the Kentville newspaperman who from memory wrote about everyday life here in the 1870s. Mr. Dennison’s “history” ran as a series in this newspaper in the summer of 1932. In this instalment we follow Dennison as he writes about the making of wool cloth and soaps and the primitive heating and lighting methods of the late 19th century.)

“Homespun grey woolen clothes were still worn by many men and boys among farmers in my childhood. In the spring the sheep were washed in the river near Robert Harringtons where a sandbar made room for a pen of poles open to the water.

“Sheep were driven there, and the men catching the struggling animals, carried them into the water, held them between their knees and squeezed the dirt out in the running stream. Then the shearing took place with hand shears. For grey cloth equal parts of white and black wool were mixed, then sent to Killam’s carding mill on Bear Brook in Steam Mill village to be made into rolls. The rolls were spun into yarn by housewives and girls, then woven on hand looms into cloth.

“Then there was a lighter cloth made with ‘cotton warp,’ generally in white, for underwear for men and boys, and for light blankets. Knit underwear, socks and mittens for winter were all-wool and in some cases the yarn was dyed. Coppers for blue, rosine for red and pink, and the inner bark of the yellow birch for brown, were among the dyes used. A boy with double mittens, knit double thickness, was envied on cold days.

“Soft soap for washing clothes was still made in farmhouses from lye bleached from hardwood ashes. The lye and soap grease were boiled, generally in a huge three-legged iron pot holding a bushel or more, in a stone fireplace in the yard. The verb ‘softsoap,’ used as s synonym for ‘beguile’ or ‘flatter’ in the locution ‘He softsoaped them’, was still heard in my childhood.”

In the above on sheep washing, the river by the Robert Harrington place undoubtedly was a section of the Cornwallis in Coldbrook. The location of Killam’s carding mill on “Bear brook” in Steam Mill is puzzling; this may have been a brook on North Aldershot Road or simply another name for the Canard River. Continuing his reminiscing, Dennison writes about heating and lighting in the 1870s home.

“The Franklin heating stove had not gone out of use 60s years ago and my grandmother, Mrs. Mary Jane Dennison, had two of them, while coal oil or kerosene was almost universally used in homes and business places for lighting.

“Candles were still made by farm housewives. Children had a bedtime candle, a candle was used for errands to the cellar; a candle would be put in a perforated tin lantern and used out of doors or in barns and carriage houses.

“Bedsteads were of wood, with rope lashed crosswise and endwise to support first a straw tick and then a feather bed, of ten of voluminous size. Geese ‘picked’ of their inner breast feathers in the spring supplied the feathers for bed and pillows, and chicken feathers made what were considered inferior beds.

Dennison closed this part of his account with a brief description of local blacksmith shops where “besides shoeing horses and oxen,’ repairs could be made on every piece of equipment and every tool used on the farm and in the woods. Blacksmith shops, Dennison said, were often the social center for the “men from the nearby farms.”