“I will now take up the Cornwallis River and its bridge at Kentville,” magistrate Edmond J. Cogswell wrote in the April 4, 1892 edition of The Western Chronicle. This was one of numerous mentions of the Cornwallis River in this newspaper during the 60 plus years it was published in Kentville (from 1873 to the early 1930s).

In 1865, the provincial House of Assembly passed an Act to “provide for building an Aboiteau across the Cornwallis River.” Even earlier, in 1846, in the proceedings of the House of Assembly, it is recorded that one John Parsons was given a grant towards building a bridge over the Cornwallis River. Going even farther back, in 1761 Thomas Louder petitioned the provincial government for a grant to operate a ferry on the Cornwallis River (as recorded in a 1933 thesis on pre-Loyalist settlements on the Minas Basin). A few years later the government received a petition from settlers along the Cornwallis River protesting Louder’s high ferry rates.

These are only a few of the recorded glimpses of the Cornwallis River, establishing that at least since 1761 this has been the accepted name of the river. In other words, the river has been known as the Cornwallis, officially and unofficially, for over 250 years. There apparently never was any official provincial government Act officially establishing the river’s name. Common usage, simply calling the stream the “Cornwallis River” year after year, decade after decade, established its name.

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Near the arbitrarily named Eaves Hollow in the east end of Kentville, the walking trail crosses Elderkin Brook. The trail, of course, is the old railway bed. Elderkin Brook, which is piped under the trail, has connections with the building of the railway, and possibly with an Acadian mill site. This, to my mind, makes the area historically significant.

First, the Acadians’ connection with Elderkin Brook: While the evidence may be tenuous at best, research by a celebrated biologist and researcher John Erskine concluded that an Acadian mill likely was located about where the brook runs under the highway. Erskine admitted the evidence was feeble but he found seven species of trees at the site that usually are associated with Acadian activity. To quote Erskine: “Millers needed to live near their mills and usually they left some of their flora behind.”

Possible historical sites have been marked with commemorative plaques on far less evidence than what Erskine offers. It’s also well-known that New Minas, next to the possible mill site, was an Acadian settlement.

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I wasn’t the first to suggest we should change the name of the Cornwallis River. Also, it’s likely immodest to believe that one of my columns, written 13 years ago, spurred the move to change the river’s name.

However, I may have been the first to promote the idea of a name change in a Valley newspaper. In an issue of The Advertiser in September 2004 I wrote about a conversation with Mi’kmaq elder Dr. Daniel Paul regarding what he said was the inappropriate use of the Cornwallis name. In a follow-up column a few years ago (March 3, 2015) I suggested that the Mi’kmaq name for the river, Chijekwtook, was more authentic and perhaps should be considered if a name change is made.

With apologies to my Mi’kmaq friends who were the first to use the land here – and who find the Cornwallis name objectionable, to say the least, there are precedents for considering something other than calling the Cornwallis River by a Mi’kmaq name. If the decision is ever made to change the river’s name there are historical precedents for considering something other than the Mi’kmaq designation for the watercourse. The fact is that Chijekwtook (or the latest spelling Jijuktu’kwejk) is more a topographical description than a river’s name. In his book on place names in Kings County, Dr. Watson Kirkconnell says that this translates into “deep narrow river.” Kirkconnell was quoting Dr. Silas Rand who compiled a Mi’kmaq dictionary.

Let’s agree that the name of the Cornwallis River should be changed. In all fairness, as well as the Mi’kmaq designation for the Cornwallis, we should also consider what the Acadians called the river. For the most part, the Mi’kmaq had no permanent settlements in Kings County but there were seasonal camping grounds depending on the time of year. On the other hand, the Acadians had well-established settlements in several places in Kings County – Grand Pre, New Minas and Canard, for example, and they had non-topographical names for the rivers, names that were recorded on some of the first maps the French made of this region centuries ago.

Quoting Dr. Watson Kirkconnell again, the Acadians called the Cornwallis “la Riviere Grand Habitant (or St. Antoine).” Other sources that confirm this: A map published by the French in 1755 (which was based on a 1649 map) shows the Cornwallis River as “R. Habitant.” A website, the Acadian & French-Canadian Ancestral Home, indicates the Cornwallis was “the Riviere St-Antoine or la Riviere Grand-Habitant.” Also, in his book Sods, Soil, and Spades, J. Sherman Bleakney included a map based on observations made in Kings County in 1649, in 1700 and in 1751. In this map, which was published in 1755, what was to become the Cornwallis River is shown as R. Habitant.

Then there’s the Planter name for the Cornwallis River, which also should be considered. One source says that at first the Kings County Planters referred to the Cornwallis as the Salmon River but I was unable to confirm this. However, one map from the Planter period indicates that for a while the Cornwallis was known as the Horton River.

In Haliburton’s History of Nova Scotia, published in 1829, the author writes that the Horton River divides the townships of Horton and Cornwallis, which pins it down as being today’s Cornwallis River. Haliburton adds an interesting footnote to the effect that the Horton River is “indifferently called by the name of either Township, and is as often known by the name of Cornwallis River as the other.”

So there you have it. Rename of the Cornwallis River if we must, but let’s not only consider what the Mi’kmaqs called it.

During the First World War, my father served in the infantry and a cavalry unit and I heard stories about trench warfare and charges on horseback over fields raked by machine gun fire. Later, when my brothers came home after World War 2, the stories were totally different, and yet similar in vein.

I recall that the stories never revealed what war was really like, what my siblings and my father felt and the effect the fighting had on them. They told stories, but their tales never really conveyed what it was like to be on the battlefield.

I can say the same about many of the books I’ve read on the two great wars and the Korean conflict. What I mean is that words in books simply cannot explicitly express the horrors of war and tell us what it was like to be in the trenches, what it was like to be bombed and shot at, what it was like to have your fellow soldiers killed around you. To put it another way, you truly had to be there, to experience it yourself to understand what it was like to go to war.

Some books are the exception and they come close to capturing what the war experience was like. One of those books is a little-known volume of wartime recollections called Times to Remember by the late Major R. G. “Bill” Thexton of Wolfville; this was first published in 1995 and reissued last year.

During World War 2, Annapolis Royal native Robert G. Thexton (1918-2013) served with the West Nova Scotia Regiment, from 1940 to 1944, in England, Scotland, Sicily and Italy. During action, he was badly wounded but he rejoined his regiment after recovering, eventually serving in Europe after the war with peacetime forces.

Upon retiring from the military, Thexton was employed at Acadia University for 20 years. Through this latter period, he was actively involved with his old regiment and it was through the West Nova Scotia Regimental Association that the latest issue of his book was published.

Thexton’s book had its birth with a series of talks he gave at the West Nova Scotia Memory Club, which he was persuaded to expand upon and publish. As Colonel Ian Hope noted in the foreword, in this book Thexton “shows us details of life in wartime Aldershot, on convoy across the Atlantic, with the regiment in threatened England, ashore in Sicily and throughout the liberation of Italy.

“To those interested in history, Colonel Hope also said, “this account has so much to offer. Here is a glimpse of war on a grand scale. With Thexton you feel the presence of the combined armies and navies and air force that destroyed the German army in Italy. You sense herein the science of war circa 1944, with its mass and sophistication, in which infantry battalions were mere buckets of solid fuel to be burned almost empty in a single night, reconstituted again between battles, only to be burned empty again in the next.”

This is an accurate summation of this book but the Colonel might also have said that Thexton bluntly points out horrible errors by military commanders that led to so many deaths in his regiment. This aside, Thexton uses his great recall to tell us the important role the West Nova Scotia Regiment played in Italy, a role that helped to win the Second World War. We see the war through the eyes of a wartime military commander who was there and tells us how it really happened. A great read, in other words, for anyone for anyone interested in the military history of Nova Scotia.

Thexton’s book is available from the West Nova Scotia Regimental Association. Contact Garry Randall at 902-680-6352

Born in New London, Connecticut, in 1730, Samuel Willoughby was a grantee here in 1761, receiving one and a half shares, or the equivalent of about 750 acres of farmland in Cornwallis Township. Willoughby was among the original Kings County grantees who settled on farmland vacated by the Acadians, but he stood out in many ways from his fellow Planters.

As Dr. Allan Marble noted in a September 28 talk at the Historical Society museum, Samuel Willoughby has the distinction of being the first medical practitioner in Kings County. Willoughby practiced medicine in Kings County from 1761 to 1785. As well, he served his community in other capacities, including Justice of the Peace and two terms in the House of Assembly representing Cornwallis Township.

Dr. Marble’s talk included brief overviews of the career of Willoughby and other prominent Kings County doctors in the 18^th and 19^th century. Among them was Dr. Isaac Webster (1766-1851) Dr. William Bennett Webster (1798-1861) and Dr. Jonathan Borden (1809 -1875). Highlighted also were the careers of later Kings County doctors such as Dr. Elias Nichols Payzant (1830-1925) who practiced in Lakeville and Wolfville, and physicians/surgeons Dr. George E. DeWitt (1842-1924) and Dr. Connell E. A. DeWitt (1882-1973) both of whom also practiced in Wolfville.

Relatively speaking, medical practice was in its infancy during the early Planter period in Kings County. As Dr. Marble noted, in Willoughby’s time medical practice in Kings County hadn’t advanced much beyond the use of emetics, diuretics, cathartics and blood-letting. These practices as well as alternate therapies to treat illness were in vogue when the Planters arrived in Kings County, and as Dr. Marble said, they would remain in vogue until well into the next century.

The history of medicine in Kings County, the theme of Dr. Marble’s talk, also took in the establishment of hospitals in Kings County. Apparently the first hospital in Kings County was established in Wolfville. In 1902, Dr. George E. DeWitt opened the Wolfville Highlands Sanatorium for the treatment of tuberculosis. Two years later the provincial sanatorium opened in Kentville. The third hospital in the county, the Westwood Hospital, was opened, also in Wolfville, by Dr. George E. DeWitt in 1918; Wolfville’s next hospital, the Eastern Kings Memorial, opened in 1930. Previously Berwick’s Western Kings Memorial Hospital had opened in 1922, the same year the Kings County Poor House and Asylum opened in Waterville; in Kentville the Blanchard-Fraser Memorial Hospital opened in 1938.

As well as a hospital timeline, Dr. Marble discussed the evolution of disease treatment. In Willoughby’s time common disease such as measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever and whooping cough sometimes were serious illnesses. Germ theory and the idea that bacteria existed and caused infection was unheard of (it wouldn’t be until the late 19^th century that leading surgeons and medical practitioners in England and France accepted the findings of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister).

When the Planters arrived in Kings County the revolutionary medical discoveries of Pasteur and Lister were far in the future. From this, as Dr. Marble inferred in his talk on medical history, everyday life in 18^th century Kings County must have been extremely fearful to say the least.

Dr. Marble is the president of the Medical History Society of Nova Scotia. He is the author of 10 historical books.

Dr. Allan Marble, right, and Kings Historical Society president Maynard Stevens confer at the monthly meeting of the Society. At the meeting Dr. Marble spoke about the medical history of Kings County. (Bria Stokesbury)

In files at the Kings County Museum is a brief history of the various bridges that spanned the Cornwallis River at Port Williams. It was this history that I looked at when putting together the August 29 column on the Avonport covered bridge.

Basically, I was hoping to learn if there had ever been a covered bridge at Port Williams. I assumed after consulting this history – and Eaton’s history of Kings County – that there had never been a covered bridge at the Port since there was no mention of it in either source. In the column I went so far as to say the covered bridge at Avonport was the only one of this type in Kings County.

This was a mistake, an error. I was guilty of not digging deep enough; for example I neglected to check the book on Port Williams where there is a detailed history of the Cornwallis River bridge. To quote from The Port Remembers: “In all, there have been four bridges at this crossing. One had a railing and one was covered. The covered bridge was sold in 1856.”

The Port Williams history doesn’t tell us how many years the bridge at the Port was covered. Was it in 1780, when according Eaton’s history of Kings County the first bridge across the Cornwallis River at Port Williams was built as early as that year? Or was it in 1835 when a new bridge was opened? About all we know for sure is the bridge was covered up until 1885. In that year a new iron bridge replaced the well-worn old one and according to the Port Williams history, the new bridge was built inside the covered one.

There is controversy over when the first bridge was built at the Port, some historians disagreeing with Eaton that it was in place at least as early as 1780. Part of the problem with this is that the bridge at Port Williams may have been privately owned at times, operating with a toll system. Government records show that legislation was passed in 1818, in 1825 and in 1834, allotting funds for the bridge. What happened before that and when the bridge was first covered is anyone’s guess.

While on the topic of covered bridges, I must mention a telephone call I received from Blain Coldwell about the Gaspereau River covered bridge. Coldwell says he has been trying for years to determine how the bridge was removed – was it burnt down according to local folklore, dynamited or taken apart manually?

To answer Coldwell’s question, the answer is that after the covering was manually removed, the remaining structure was dynamited. This took place on January 29, 1952, and apparently boats were on hand to collect the debris that was scattered over the Gaspereau River.

When a spring issue of The Acadian was published in Wolfville on May 23, 1867, there was no hint in its four-page broadsheet that a momentous event would take place in a few weeks.

Earlier that year, on February 11, the British North America Act was presented to Queen Victoria. The Act received royal assent on March 29 and July 1 was set as the date when the Dominion of Canada would come into existence.

Some 150 years ago, Major and William Theakston, the publishers of The Acadian, obviously concerned themselves with filling their paper with advertisements for patent medicine rather than the upcoming birth of a nation. Other issues of The Acadian published in the spring and summer of 1867 also ignored the birth of Canada. Aside from shipping news for the ports of Canning and Windsor, and a list of the newspaper’s agents in Kings County (17 in all) there was little news of any consequence in the May 23 issue – and other 150 year old Acadians I had the privilege of examining recently at the Kings County Museum.

Actually, it’s almost a miracle that any of those old issues of The Acadian survived. They were almost lost. Richard Skinner tells me that for nearly 150 years the papers, along with other documents, were stored in a trunk at a house in Canning. It was Skinner who eventually salvaged the contents of the trunk and brought them to the attention of the Museum.

As the story goes, Karnan Ells of Medford found the chest stored in the annex of a century plus house he purchased in Canning. When he wanted to clean up the property, Ells had the chest stored in a friend’s barn. This building collapsed during the winter of 2014-2015, damaging the trunk and destroying most of it contents. At this point the barn’s owner, hoping there was something of historical interest in the trunk, gave it to Richard Skinner; he in turn contacted Karnan Ells and obtained permission to pass the trunk and its contents to the Kings Historical Society.

Most of the newspapers stored in the trunk were destroyed when the barn collapsed. Only a few of The Acadian newspapers where in good enough condition to be recorded digitally. However, numerous letters stored in the trunk also were salvaged by Richard Skinner. The letters date from 1864 to 1916 but are mainly from the 1860s.

As for Major and William Theakston, they barely managed to keep The Acadian going after Canada became a nation, closing it a few years later when vandals destroyed their equipment. They must be saluted as newspaper pioneers, however, but bad luck ones at that.

If you dismiss a short-lived attempt in 1859 by Campbell Stephens to publish a newspaper in Wolfville, the first newspaper in Kings County was started in Canning. This was the Kings County Gazette which Major Theakston purchased after it was in operation for about a year. When Canning was destroyed by a fire in 1866 (the first bit of bad luck for Theakston) he closed the paper and moved to Wolfville. With his brother William he established The Acadian there. After a report in The Acadian about the conviction of apple thieves, the newspaper’s office was broken into and anything moveable was thrown into a nearby creek.

This was enough for the Theakstons and they left the county. A few copies of their newspaper remain, however, thanks to the vigilance of Richard Skinner. Those remaining copies have been digitalised at the Kings County Museum and saved for posterity.

Richard Skinner looks over a 150-year-old copy of The Acadian, a newspaper published in Wolfville before Canada became a nation. (Coleman)

As a direct result of running its line along what at the time was the northern boundary of Kentville, the Windsor & Annapolis Railway created a building boom. Records show that through 1868 and 1869 at least 200 new homes were built within a mile of the rail lines in the Kentville area. There was yet another boom in 1870 just after the railway moved its headquarters from Wolfville to Kentville.

A change in the railway’s original plan to bypass the town also helped to bring Kentville to prominence. The line running into Kings County was originally supposed to cross the Cornwallis River at Port Williams and run west, skirting the town. We can only speculate but perhaps the cost of building a railway bridge over the Cornwallis River was a factor in the railway’s change of plans – it was simpler and there had to be less expense involved in running the line straight into Kentville from Wolfville along the south bank of the Cornwallis River.

The elimination of a costly bridge, and the fact that, unlike Wolfville, Kentville had land available to build the various machine shops, sheds, turntables, roundhouses and a station that would also house the railway’s headquarters, made the town the obvious choice for the railway’s destination. Kentville prospered and Wolfville lost the opportunity to become the major town in Kings County. A lack of enough available land for the railway to build in Wolfville apparently was the problem. However, newspaper accounts from the period hint that while space was available, the citizens and merchants of Wolfville weren’t willing give up this land for the railway to build on.

As noted in the town’s history, Mud Creek, the railway at first operated out of Wolfville. “In 1869 Wolfville was the headquarters of the W & A. R. The car shops were located here and the two engines built in Bristol, England, No. 1 Evangeline and No. 2 Gabriel, were landed in Wolfville.

This was to quickly change, however. As the editors of Mud Creek observed: “Owing to a lack of co-operation from owners of land (in Wolfville) the headquarters were removed to Kentville.” Later the building of a spur line (the Cornwallis Valley Railway) from Kingsport to Kentville dealt yet another blow to the town when (quoting from Mud Creek) “in 1897 the W. & A. R. removed their tracks from the Wolfville wharf as an incentive to get the C.V.R. (in Kingsport) into operation.”

Wolfville’s loss was Kentville’s gain. Kentville became a major centre (the railway later adding to the town’s lustre by building the magnificent Cornwallis Inn). With its rail link to Kentville, Kingsport became a major shipping port and Wolfville’s role as the railway’s
Bay of Fundy connection vanished.

As mentioned, the building boom in an around Kentville was an immediate result of the railway relocating its headquarters there. As can be seen from scanning the various directories published in the years following relocation of its headquarters in Kentville, the railway also became a major employer. For example, Clarke’s history records that the total number of railway employees in 1921 was 800 in Nova Scotia; of this 800 some 320 lived in Kentville. The railway’s payroll in Kentville alone in 1921 was $400,000.

These figures alone illustrate how much Wolfville lost when the railway relocated to Kentville.

In the spring of 1952 The Advertiser published its annual apple blossom issue with a photograph of a covered bridge on its cover. The caption on the photograph read: “The old covered bridge at Avonport, 1876 – 1952.”

Condemned for various reasons, the bridge had been torn down (or burned down) early in 1952 and replaced with a temporary Bailey bridge. According to the caption, the bridge had spanned the relatively narrow section of the Gaspereau River at Avonport for 76 years; which is a long lifetime for a structure built in a period when wood was the main component in bridges.

However, the covered bridge may have been around longer than 76 years. Before I get into this, it should be noted that the bridge is likely one of a kind, that is, it’s the only covered bridge ever built in Kings County. Local folklore says there was a covered bridge at one time on the Cornwallis River at Port Williams. And there’s a website on the covered bridges of Nova Scotia that says there was one at Port Williams. However, the webmaster of this site tells me this reference will be removed shortly, apparently because there are no valid records to back this up.

Getting back to the lifespan of the Avonport covered bridge, I’ve found several dates for when it was built. In his history of Avonport, Gordon Haliburton quotes a petition that was presented to the government in 1794 for replacement of the “lower bridge crossing the Salmon (Gaspereau) River” which had been carried away by ice and tide. The use of the word “replacement” establishes that the bridge existed before 1794. Haliburton goes on to say that the correct date for building the covered bridge is uncertain and “one source says 1869 and another says 1876.”

Another source, a handwritten history of Avonport (author unknown) is in the files of the Kings County Museum and it says the bridge was built in 1864. A long poem saluting the bridge and lamenting its demise was published in the Hants Journal circa 1953. The author, Harry Reid, estimates the bridge was built in 1874. Reid’s grandfather, Joshua, is believed to have been one of the designers of the bridge and had worked on it as a carpenter.

Apparently the only date that’s likely correct is one of the two Haliburton gives – 1869. In his book on place names of Nova Scotia, C. Bruce Fergusson clearly states that the bridge was constructed in 1869. Fergusson served as the assistant provincial archivist from 1946 to 1956 and as provincial archivist from 1956 to 1977, and as such would have access to valid historical records. From this we have to assume that the covered bridged was built the year Fergusson says it was.

The covered bridge at Avonport was one of at least 15 and perhaps as many as 20 that was built in Nova Scotia, of which there were five in the Annapolis Valley. A covered bridge once spanned the Avon River, connecting Falmouth and Windsor; built in 1836, the bridge was destroyed by fire in 1888. A second covered bridge on the Avon may have been located higher up the river at Windsor Forks.

There were three covered bridges on the Annapolis River, at Bridgetown, Lawrencetown and Brickton. Most of these covered bridge lasted well simply because they were covered. The covered bridge in Kennetcook (the last one in the province) stood for nearly a century until about 1960. The reason bridges were covered was the protection they offered from the elements. This was the main purpose for building them – and the fact that horses often balked at crossing open bridges was a good reason as well.

Today, only people of the senior generations recall Avonport’s covered bridge, and few living today can say they crossed it. If you drove across this bridge, as I did many times, you probably remember the tricky turn at the entrance on the Avonport side. The author of Blomidon Rose saluted this approach to the bridge, Esther Clark Wright calling it an “inconvenient and dangerous angle” that wasn’t corrected when the Bailey bridge went up.

The covered bridge on the Gaspereau River at Avonport was built in 1869 and removed early in 1952. This was the only covered bridge in Kings County.

When Cyril White commissioned artist Edwin Hollett to paint a mural of the Kentville train station on the old warehouse adjacent to his business several years ago, he noted that he’d made White’s Funeral Home the repository for historic town images.

White has continued to do this with yet another mural with a historical theme called Kentville’s Memory Lane. Also painted by Hollett (on the opposite side of the warehouse wall showing the train station) the mural depicts Kentville as it was at various times over the past 150 or so years. Approximately 20 meters long by about 2 meters high, the mural has 15 panels with 23 scenes of old-time Kentville; most of the scenes show buildings that have long since vanished.

Coincidentally, the warehouse the murals grace is also of historic interest. The warehouse was built next to the railway line by the British apple exporter Herbert Oyler when the apple growing industry was booming; the warehouse had it own spur line beside the main track. Later, after the apple industry collapsed, the Oyler warehouse was purchased by the P. R. Ritcey Co. Limited, a grocery wholesaler fronting on Aberdeen Street near the railway station. Ritcey used the spur line to receive shipments into the 1960s. When Ritcey’s store was demolished in the 1980s the Oyler warehouse was converted to a branch of Cleves Sporting Goods; when this closed in 2013 the building was purchased by White’s Funeral Home.

Now that you have the warehouses’ history, let’s look at some of the scenes on the latest mural on its north wall:

The centrepiece of this magnificent mural features the Oakgrove Cemetery, which was established in 1817 when the Peck family set aside a half acre of land for a public burying ground.

The illustration to the right of the centrepiece, the Aberdeen Hotel, was built in 1892. Privately owned at first, it was purchased by the D.A.R. in 1920 and renamed the Cornwallis Inn. The hotel was demolished after a new Cornwallis Inn was built on Main Street in 1930.

The Blanchard Fraser Memorial Hospital – opened in 1938 and serving until the Valley Regional Hospital opened in 1992 – and the Nova Scotia San which opened in 1904, are illustrated on the left on the centrepiece. The grounds of the “San” is now the site of the Valley Regional Hospital.

Little is known about the history of one old building illustrated on the mural – the Kentville Exhibition Building. Louis Comeau, who has a photograph of the building, dated circa 1890, in his book Historic Kentville, writes that it was constructed in the mid-1880s (and possibly in 1879) but gives no other details. The building burned to the ground in 1900.

One of the most interesting buildings illustrated in the mural is the Nova Scotia Carriage Factory, which began to manufacture carriages and sleighs in 1868 and was located where the county municipal building now stands. Few people know that the McKay Motor Car was also manufactured there between 1910 and 1912.

Also illustrated is the three-story post office that was built on Aberdeen Street in 1899 and served the town until 1962. The Bank of Montreal and various office suites, including this newspaper, now occupy the site.

Among the other buildings shown in the mural are the D.A.R. roundhouse, Kentville’s fire station (the building also housed the former Town Hall), the Kings County Courthouse (built in 1904 or 1905 depending on which source you are consulting) which today is headquarters for the Kings Historical Society and the Red Store, which opened in 1828 and operated continuously for 132 years on the corner of Main and Cornwallis Street. Several now-defunct retail stores and car dealerships are included in the mural as well.

All in all, the mural is an extraordinary capturing of many of Kentville’s long gone historic buildings. With this second mural, Cyril White’s intent to make his place of business a repository for historic Kentville images definitely has taken a step forward.

Measuring about 20 meters by 2 meters (60’ by 8’) this mural on the White Family Funeral Home’s storage building has 23 historic images, many of them long gone Kentville buildings. (Ed Coleman)

Kentville’s Oakgrove cemetery is the centrepiece on White’s new mural. The Oakgrove was established as a public burying ground in 1817. (Ed Coleman)