Category Archives: History 2024

WOLFVILLE STILE AN ICON IN ITS DAY (March 5/24)

They were a necessity at one time, in the period when sections of the dykes were fenced to contain cattle and horses.

The Oxford Canadian Dictionary defines them as an “arrangement of steps allowing people but not animals to climb over a fence or wall.” We knew them simply as “stiles.”

I climbed over a few stiles in my day but if I remember correctly, by the late 1950s there were few to be found in the upper area of the Canard dykes. The stiles and fences disappeared when dyking of cattle in the fall was discontinued.

The stiles I remember were made of rough-hewn lumber; definitely sturdy, they were constructed to last, and you’d never believe they could attract people or were romantic in any way.

But think again.

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SOLDIERS OF THE QUEEN – ACADIA UNIVERSITY STUDENTS AT WAR (February 6/24)

The Korean conflict in the 1950s is often hailed as Canada’s forgotten war. The same can be said of the South African (Boer) War (1899-1902) for which over a thousand Canadians initially volunteered. Except for memorials in Halifax and Canning and the odd record of Boer War veterans on Legion cenotaphs, this truly is a forgotten conflict.

However, the stories of Boer War veterans, some of the young men who attended university in Wolfville, are being told. Acadia University archivist Wendy Robicheau is on a mission to collect the stories of those Acadia students, and to use a cliché, save them for posterity. “I want to know their stories,” Robicheau said. “Who are they? What happened to them?”

To find their stories, Robicheau began by searching war records, which she found to be sketchy at best. “It is mostly by chance that I’ve been able to find these men, although sometimes they find me,” Robicheau said, giving as an example a visit to the war memorial in Port Williams where she found Private Congdon and Private Lockwood (of which more below).

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ACADIA PROF. SPURRED 1916 PLAN TO HARVEST ELECTRICITY FROM FUNDY TIDES (January 23/24)

Before the First World War “there was much coming and going to Cape Split by an odd little Physics professor at Acadia,” Esther Clark Wright wrote in her book, Blomidon Rose. “Some materials were transported across and around the mountain (to Cape Split) but nothing came of the affair.”

Wright doesn’t tell us which Acadia professor she was referring to as odd and little – three were involved in the so-called “affair” – but she was referring to an attempt in 1916 to harness the tides at Cape Split and generate awesome amounts of electricity.

The odd little man Wright refers to may have been Acadia’s engineering professor, Ralph C. Clarkson, an American who had joined the University’s faculty in 1912. He had patented a unique tide-generated turbine, the Clarkson Hydraulic Current Motor. The motor was the key ingredient in a scheme, originating apparently with Clarkson, to generate electricity at Cape Split and potentially light up the entire Maritimes.

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EARLY HANTS AND KINGS NEWSPAPERS – HISTORY OF THEM INTERESTING AND COMPLICATED (January 9/24)

For the most part, earlier newspapers now out of print were compilations of dull advertisements and smatterings of what newspaper people today call news copy.

On the other hand, they’re goldmines of information, and little windows into the past. Simply fill in the blanks, read the ads, what there is of the stilted news reports, and you have inklings of what people did a century or more ago and what mattered most to them.

One of my pastimes is reading those old newspapers. Unfortunately, one of my regrets is that some of those old papers exist today only as archival copies, and while I have no choice and have to read them online, I don’t enjoy it. If that makes me a Luddite, then so be it. No apologies.

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