The old rail bed is a walking trail and on it here and there you’ll find trestle bridges and the odd signal post the railway forgot to remove. Except for a handful of historical books and collections of old photographs taken by the likes of A. L. Hardy and his contemporaries, little else remains of the railway.

Of course, a few of the old railway hands are still here; and many people who rode the trains remember the railway’s heyday when the Valley thundered to the shunting of steam locomotives.

Then there’s what is remembered by those railway crews who still dwell among us. One is George Acker who was born in Granville Ferry in 1931 and now resides in Kentville. Acker’s father was a railwayman in Annapolis. “He was what was called an engine watchman,” Acker says. “One of his jobs was shovelling coal by hand into the tenders of the locomotives.”

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I’m not positive this is the correct year but around 1968 or 1969, Kentville Publishing Company purchased The Acadian, Wolfville’s weekly newspaper, and shortly after started printing it as a section of The Advertiser.

While The Acadian wasn’t the first newspaper to be published in the town, it ran for over 70 years and was truly a Wolfville creation. A handful of other publications made a stab at publishing newspapers in Wolfville but for the most part, they were short-lived, some lasting less than a year.

The founder of The Acadian was Arthur Stanley Davison who was born at Long Island, Grand Pre, in 1865. Davison should be recognized as an Annapolis Valley newspaper pioneer. However, he had an abbreviated career as a publisher and also a tragically short life, dying at the age of 23.

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Writing about the old Halifax-Annapolis Road in the Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society some 50 years ago, Mrs. G. R. Evans points out errors that were made when it was “relocated and marked” by officer cadets from CFB Cornwallis in 1967.

This was a commendable effort Evans wrote, but she doubted that even the best surveyors of the province “could now locate the whole course of the Halifax- Annapolis Road with any degree of accuracy.” First of all, the road which was supposed to connect Halifax with Annapolis Royal was never completed. A sign posted by the cadets noting their achievement contained an error as well, Evans noted, which attributed the wrong person as the original surveyor.

The main purpose of the Halifax-Annapolis Road was to eliminate the supposedly more difficult and longer route to Annapolis Royal via the Annapolis Valley. The fact that a route through the Valley existed and an attempt was made to provide an alternate route has led to all sorts of confusion between the old Halifax-Annapolis Road and a road known in various communities as the Canaan Road and the Nictaux Road. Despite the two names, this is one road and it isn’t the old Halifax to Annapolis highway. The confusion came perhaps because a start had been made at Annapolis Royal on the Halifax-Annapolis Road. And adding to the confusion, records indicate that a road from Annapolis Royal had also been roughed out that leads to Nictaux.

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It’s long gone but for over a generation it was a local landmark, a romantic rendezvous, a challenge to cross if you were timid or it was stormy, and a traditional target for vandals throughout the years, and especially at Hallowe’en.

This was the Gaspereau River’s famous swinging bridge that for at least 50 years connected White Rock to a power company generating station known as Hell’s Gate. No one knows for sure the year the swinging bridge was put in place but it must have been after 1929, the year the Hell’s Gate generating station was built. The best guess, by residents of the area, is that the then Nova Scotia Light and Power Company constructed the bridge early in the 1930s, either 1930 or 1931, but it might have been later.

While it was popular with kids living along the Gaspereau River and it attracted people far who viewed it as a challenge and a curiosity, the bridge was built by the power company solely as a convenience for its employees. At one time the Black River power system at Hell’s Gate employed 12 people year around with staff on hand 24 hours a day. Some of the former staff at Hell’s Gate recall that it was necessary to maintain staff continuously at the station and the link the bridge provided was vital.

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Most people don’t realize that much of the commercial area of New Minas, and some of its residential areas lay in huge land grants between the Cornwallis and the Gaspereau River; these grants were issued to a Planter and to a Loyalist and there’s quite a story behind them.

To give you a rough idea of the dimensions of the grants, which lay side by side, start at the bridge where the Middle Dyke Road extension crosses the Cornwallis River; run a line south over Commercial Street to the Gaspereau River and you have the western boundary. With the Cornwallis River on your left (the northern boundary) and the Gaspereau on your right (the southern boundary) go east through New Minas for about two kilometres and you have the approximate area the grants encompass. As you can see from this, a major part of the commercial section and the residential area is in those old grants.

One of the grants, 950 acres was issued to Israel Harding. A man identified only as Col. Foster received a grant of 1000 acres (the grant that is referred to as the “Foster farm” by historical writers such as Eaton and Cogswell).

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In 1759 Major Samuel Starr was one of five agents who toured this area, checking out land that the government offered to prospective New England settlers. On a solo venture, Starr was ferried across the Cornwallis River at Town Plot (below Port Williams) and went to the Look Off. On his return, notes a 1914 report of the Starr Family Association, he went through Upper Dyke “to a ford on the Cornwallis River at Kentville” where he crossed and headed to Grand Pre.

Where Starr forded the river in Kentville (or downriver from it a bit according to some sources) a bridge would later be built. At Port Williams, in the Planter period, a privately operated ferry and later a government-funded ferry would run over the river about where Starr crossed to Town Plot. Settlers from New England eventually would become weary of ferrying back and forth over the Cornwallis River and build a bridge at Port Williams. There are no records indicating otherwise so it’s safe to state that this was the first bridge on the Cornwallis River.

Today there are several Cornwallis River bridges, three in Coldbrook, one in Cambridge and one in Waterville, plus at least two solid farm bridges in the Cambridge area. The bridge in Kentville is believed to be the second oldest bridge on the Cornwallis River, but I stand to be corrected on this if anyone has records indicating otherwise. No firm date has been established on the year these bridges were first built. Eaton in the history of Kings County writes that the first bridge on the Cornwallis was built in 1780 but as noted in the history of Port Williams (The Port Remembers) this date is controversial.

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What was it like about 120 years ago, in the 1890s, along the old military road between Kentville and Wolfville, the section of highway designated today as Highway 1?

Well, with thanks to Edmond J. Cogswell, we do have some idea of what it was like then on that stretch of road, much of which today is taken up by the sprawling village of New Minas. In 1894, on a Sunday morning, Cogswell decided to walk to Wolfville after being detained in Kentville. Cogswell recorded what he observed on the walk and two years later in a regular feature he wrote for Kentville’s weekly newspaper, the Western Chronicle, he described what he saw.

But first, before he wrote about his walk, Cogswell tells us that Highway 1 began as an Acadian road that ran “near the dykes and intervals of the Cornwallis River,” and was eventually amended to merge with a military road running easterly to Windsor and south towards Berwick. “One of those long pieces of road was through what is called New Minas,” Cogswell concluded, adding that “where the present village was built” the road was altered many times as land was cleared and settled.

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When Wolfville officially incorporated on March 20, 1893, it boasted at least 20 stores and hotels, but pigs were kept within town limits and horses, oxen, and cows apparently had free rein in the streets.

Well, perhaps not exactly free rein. There was enough of a problem, however, that one of the first bylaws passed by the new town council regulated the roaming and passage of farm animals through the streets. Some 25 bylaws were quickly passed by council tackling the problem of roaming livestock, open sewers in the town, rubbish disposal and that like.

With many resolutions in place to govern the town, report the editors of Mud Creek, Wolfville’s unofficial history, the appearance of the town soon improved. But the editors noted that when it came to overall prosperity the new town still ranked slightly below Kentville and Berwick at incorporation. Perhaps at the time, these towns had as much livestock roaming the streets, but Kentville dominated as the railway centre and Berwick was the heart and soul of the apple industry.

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In my files I have copies of several historical articles written for Kings County newspapers in the 1880s and 1890s by Edmond J. Cogswell. I’ve borrowed from this invaluable source many times, which is in the public domain (and I believe Mr. Cogswell wouldn’t have minded anyway). Thanks to Cogswell, some of the early history of Kentville and New Minas has been preserved – and thanks to Cogswell I’ve been able to present some of his historical research in this column.

Take New Minas as an example of what Cogswell has found in his research. One of Cogswell’s most interesting articles is about the village as he observed it in 1896. First of all, Cogswell discovered that the New Minas the Acadians knew wasn’t located where the main part of the village is today. Cogswell wrote that “it might be amusing if they (the residents) should discover that New Minas was not New Minas at all, but another place – and that the real New Minas is in fact at the present time little more than an airy nothing.”

This was Cogswell’s way of explaining that when they arrived in this region, the Acadians called this general area Minas. “The name Minas was … given to the village built on the south shore of Minas Bay or Basin. Minas with its dykes consisted of the village along the banks of the upland, with the Grand Pre or great meadows lying in front and with Long Island and Boot Island bounding it on the north.”

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“The formal opening of the Nova Scotia Underwear Company’s new plant yesterday was an occasion long to be remembered,” reported the Windsor Tribune in its edition of June 9, 1916.

Reading about the opening in the June 1916 issue of The Busy East of Canada magazine, we find that the Nova Scotia Underwear Company has taken over the premises of the failed Dominion Cotton Mills Company, located just inside the Windsor town limits. In turn, in 1891the Dominion Cotton Mills Company had purchased a cotton processing plant on the site that was built in 1884. This plant, which was designed for carding, spinning and weaving cotton fabrics, and the Dominion Cotton Mills both failed due to what the Busy East described as “challenging economic conditions.”

Despite these early setbacks, the Nova Scotia Underwear Company’s president, J. E. Wood, was optimistic about his firm’s future in Windsor. While these were “times of national stress” Wood said (a reference to World War One raging in Europe) his Company expected to prosper by contributing “directly through the supply of underwear for the use of men in the trenches and already had done so to the extent of many thousands of dozens.”

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