Despite plenty of documentation, it’s usually difficult to determine how some of the road names in Kings County originated. But there are exceptions. Take Canard Street, for example, a 10 kilometre stretch of Highway 341 (from Porters Point to Upper Dyke) which likely was named because it runs parallel to the Canard River and along the northern edge of the Canard Dykes. For generations, residents along this highway have called it Canard Street and no matter what it says on highway maps, that’s what it is.

Not so obvious to people not familiar with our history is the origin of Middle Dyke Road. A visitor here might ask, “What’s a dyke and if there’s a Middle Dyke Road why isn’t there an upper dyke road and a lower dyke road?” After you explain about dykes and Acadians and aboiteaux you could tell the visitor that there is an Upper Dyke village and according to a map Kentville historian Brent Fox has in his book on the Wellington Dyke, the field or dyke just below it is called the Middle Dyke. Hence, I assume, this is the origin of the road’s name.

It’s likely that the original Middle Dyke Road was a two-kilometre stretch running north from Chipman Corner to Canard Street, crossing that area of the Canard River where the Acadians made an aboiteau. Today, Middle Dyke Road runs south to cross Church Street, Belcher Street and the Cornwallis River, and runs north to Canard Street and Sheffield Mills.

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(Third in a series saluting local historical writers past and present)

James Doyle Davison (1910-2003) will undoubtedly be best remembered as the editor of the definitive Wolfville history, Mud Creek. He was a prolific historical writer, however, co-authoring and editing three Baptist church histories (Springhill, Margaree and Berwick) writing a trio of books on the Planter family, the Chipmans, a history of the Davison family (Planter Davison Fivesome) a book on camping in northern Nova Scotia and several historical papers centered on Wolfville.

One of Davison’s last works (published in 1990) was a history of the old Wolfville burial ground, What Mean These Stones. This book resulted from Davison supervising the restoration of the Wolfville burial ground on Main Street, which was opened in 1763. Of the trio of Chipman books, the most interesting is titled Handley Chipman, Kings County Planter. The life of Handley Chipman (1717-1799) and early Planter life in Kings County is examined in detail in this book.

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At least as late as the early 1900s, there was a Mi’kmaq encampment about a kilometre north of downtown Kentville. The camp was in a large stand of pines (now long gone) between Cornwallis Street and Oakdene Avenue in the area now bisected by Wade and Prince Street.

I heard about the camp from my father who remembered seeing it when he was a boy. As he recalled it, the camp was only there in the spring and through the summer months.

That the Mi’kmaq camped where they did, close to a thriving village, isn’t surprising. A local historian, who over a century ago wrote extensively about the Mi’kmaq and Acadians in Kings County newspapers, penned several stories about native fishing in and around Kentville. This was Edmond J. Cogswell, a court magistrate whom I’ve quoted here before.

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Thanks mainly to the railroad, Kentville late in the 19^th century was firmly established as the leading retail and business centre in Kings County. The W & A Railway had solidified its position in the Valley by merging with the Western Counties Railway and incorporating by an Act of Parliament in 1885 as the Dominion Atlantic Railway. With its headquarters remaining in Kentville, this incorporation would solidify Kentville’s claim as the dominant town in the Annapolis Valley.

In 1885, Kentville boasted five or six small hotels (the number depending on which source you accessed), an assortment of retail stores, a few industries and a branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia. Yet to come a few years later was the magnificent Aberdeen Hotel, which was destined to be the finest hotel of the time in the Annapolis Valley.

Late in the 19^th century, iconic photographer A.L. Hardy arrived in Kentville and quickly set about preserving images of the town. One of the images Hardy captured was of Aberdeen Street looking south from the future site of the Aberdeen Hotel. It is the scene in this photograph that Centreville artist Ed Hollett used as a model to create a painting of Kentville as it appeared in 1885. Hollett used a photograph from Louis Comeau’s A. L. Hardy collection. The painting was commissioned several years ago by the Kentville Development Corporation Ltd. and is currently being raffled by the Kentville Historical Society. This is a fundraiser for the Society and tickets are available at $5 each.

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Hailed as the first institution in Canada to be established by a provincial government for treatment of tuberculosis, the Nova Scotia Sanatorium – the ”San” – opened just outside Kentville in 1904.

Yet there was a precedent that has practically been forgotten. Years earlier, around 1899, Dr. George Erastus DeWitt (1842-1924) opened the Wolfville Highlands Sanatorium just above the town. A practising physician, DeWitt was Wolfville’s medical health officer and was active in town politics, serving as a councillor and mayor.

Dr. DeWitt was a pioneer in the field of preventive medicine, especially in the treatment of tuberculosis. But except for brief mentions in a couple of history books, he has never been formally recognised for this work. His Wolfville Highlands Sanatorium for the treatment of “incipient consumption,” was established in a period when relatively little was known about the disease. As mentioned, DeWitt opened his clinic several years before the Nova Scotia Sanatorium and his “cure,” consisting mainly of rest, diet and fresh air was adopted by the San.

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“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)