PLUCK AND LUCK – THE IRISH OF HANTS AND KINGS COUNTIES (November 29/22)

To use cliches, it was a no-holds-barred battle to the finish between Irish Catholic and Protestant labourers when work was beginning on the railway in Hants County midway through the 1800s.

Writing about the incident in the history of the Dominion Atlantic Railway, Marguerite Woodworth mentions the “railway riots of 1856,” hinting there may have been a religious element – Protestants versus Catholics.

To get the real story about why the riots occurred, however, you have to turn to the historian, L. S. Loomer. In his book on Windsor, Loomer suggests that jobs and wages, not religion, likely was the cause of the riots.

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COMMUNITY TELEPHONE COMPANIES WERE EVERYWHERE ABOUT 100 YEARS AGO (November 15/22)

For anyone living in Windsor, say around 1887, a five-minute telephone call to Hantsport or Brooklyn would have cost them 20 cents. On the other hand, if one had lived in Falmouth and called Windsor or Hantsport, the charge for five minutes was 15 cents.

According to the Hants and Halifax Telephone Company, these calls were considered long-distance. The Company’s rate sheet, published by Ivan Smith in his Nova Scotia History Index (now inactive) noted also that telegraph service was available, at a charge of 15 cents per 10 words.

In contrast, with my smartphone and for about 20 odd dollars a month, I have unlimited calling anywhere in Canada, and no time limit on the calls.

But I digress. The point is that by today’s standards, the cost of telephone calls in the 1880s was expensive – if you consider that making a dollar or so a day in that period was excellent pay.

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KINGS FIDDLERS – 35 YEARS OF PRESERVING OLD-TIME FIDDLE MUSIC TRADITIONS (November 1/22)

Every Saturday morning in the early 1950s, radio stations CKAB Windsor and CKEN Kentville aired some of the finest old-time fiddle music ever played in the Annapolis Valley by local musicians.

Out of Hants County came the down east fiddling of Hantsport-based Roddy Dorman from Kings County came the medleys of Kingsport’s Ron Goodwin and Kentville’s Kenny Meisner.

Aired on the stations on Saturday mornings as well, recorded live when he performed in Kentville and Canning, were the fiddling concerts of J.B. Hamm, a roaming player who along with Dorman, Goodwin and Meisner was among the best known, most influential musicians in the Annapolis Valley.

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KELLY BOURASSA ON THE RESTORING AND PRESERVATION OF HISTORICAL ARTIFACTS (October 18/22)

On the screen is a slide with photographs of a padlock that has seen much better days.

“This padlock was found at the railway roundhouse in Kentville,” Kelly Bourassa said. “As you can see, the photograph on the left shows a heavy layer of rust, sand and soil. The photograph on the right shows the same face with all this material removed.”

At the monthly meeting of the Kentville Historical Society, Bourassa was using slides to illustrate how conservators work to restore and preserve artifacts that otherwise might have been lost. The lock was one of some 40 items dug up at the roundhouse site in Kentville when it was torn down in 2007.

“Once the lock was cleaned, we could see CPR initials,” Bourassa said. “This helped to date the lock since we know that the Dominion Atlantic Railway was taken over by the Canadian Pacific in 1917.”

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MAKING A GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND – MORE VIEWS ON THE DYKELANDS (October 4/22)

In this column, I recently covered the contrasting views historians have on the Acadians and the dykelands, quoting, in turn, Brent Fox, J. Sherman Bleakney and L.S. Loomer.

The column should have included quotes by Arthur W. H. Eaton, the author of History of Kings County, John Mack Faragher and Esther Clark Wright. Eaton wrote about the “important work of dyking the marshes, that the Acadians had long pursued,” and he described the various problems the Planters faced in maintaining the dyke system.

Faragher devoted several pages to the origin of dyking in Nova Scotia: “In one of the most remarkable developments of 17th century North America,” he observed, “French settlers in l’Acadie developed a distinctive agricultural economy based on the farming of reclaimed marshland, diked in from the tides.”

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WRITERS AND HISTORIANS HAVE CONTRASTING VIEWS ON ACADIANS AND THE DYKELANDS (September 20/22)

In an unpublished paper about building the Wellington Dyke on the Canard River, Brent Fox speculates that the dyke-building expertise of the Acadians possibly could have Dutch origins.

“The people of the Netherlands have been noted for [dyke-building] for many centuries,” Fox wrote. “In an indirect manner, it is possible that [centuries ago] the Dutch provided the special knowledge that helped convert the marsh and tidal lake areas of present-day Kings County into… valuable agricultural land.”

 In various papers I’ve read on the Acadians and dyke-building I’ve never found any references to historic Dutch connections. We could assume that Fox was speculating about this connection, but he may not have been. Further on he writes that in the 16th century, “Dutch engineers were brought into France to oversee massive dyking projects.”

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BLOODY HOLLOW – AN 1890s ACCOUNT OF A MASSACRE IN WEST END KENTVILLE (September 6/22)

Dates vary and there are several tales about a skirmish that took place in west-end Kentville in the 18th century.

It may have been more than a skirmish. Some historical writers say that a massacre actually took place in Kentville involving the Mi’kmaq and French on one hand, and British troops or militia forces out of New England on the other. This occurred at a place known in folklore by various names – Bloody Hollow and Moccasin Hollow, for example.

But did it really happen? Was there a massacre or nothing more than a minor fracas that never made the military records? Further, did historians who wrote about the event base it on folklore or facts?

The answer is that it depends on what or who you believe.

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Louis Comeau – The Man Who Saved Kentville (August 23/22)

A comprehensive history of Kentville has never been written. Much of what is documented on the town exists in fragments, in folklore and historical glimpses.

You won’t find documented anywhere, for example, that Kentville was a quiet village in a corner of Horton township when the railway arrived.

It isn’t written anywhere that Kentville boomed, more than doubling in size a few years after the railway arrived. You won’t find it recorded that the NS Sanatorium and Camp Aldershot added extra spurts to the town’s growth.

You can find plenty of Kentville trivia – such as the folktale that the town owes its location to a Mi’kmaq/Acadian crossing on the Cornwallis River, or that the Duke of Kent passed by, circa 1794, to give the town its name.

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EARLY RAILWAY MISHAPS – NO GORY DETAILS SPARED IN NEWSPAPER REPORTS (August 9/22)

In the history of Windsor, published in 1996, L.S. Loomer writes that there were accidents on the railway almost from the first day. In 1855, two years before the projected line from Halifax was supposed to reach Windsor, a locomotive named the Mayflower went off the track. The damage was minimal but it was the first recorded incident and one of many that would plague the railway as the line was extended to Windsor and west through the Annapolis Valley.

Some of the early accidents on the line, written about by Loomer, were fatal. Three, possibly four brakemen were killed in separate accidents, Loomer said, when their heads struck a footbridge the railway built over Wentworth Road in Windsor. The footbridge eventually was replaced by a standard crossing, but too late to save the lives of the brakemen.

Like Loomer, Marguerite Woodworth records various accidents in her history of the Dominion Atlantic Railway. All the incidents made the news, even the trivial accidents, and usually with plenty of detail by the newspapers of the day.

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WHY KENTVILLE FLOURISHED – HISTORICAL PRECEDENCE, CONVENIENT OPEN SPACES (July 26/22)

When Heather Davidson wrote a short history of Kentville for the Board of Trade in 1979, She asked why the town prospered after the railway arrived in the Annapolis Valley.

“Why Kentville? Why Here?” Davidson asked in the eight-page booklet on the town’s rise to prominence. This was a good question, but what also could have been asked is why Windsor and Wolfville were eliminated when a site for the railway’s headquarters was being considered.

At the time tracks were laid, compared to Kentville and Wolfville, Windsor was already an advanced mercantile and industrial centre with a substantial residential area. Kentville looked to Windsor, for example, on how to set up a water system for the fledgling town. For a short period, Wolfville was the railway’s headquarters, but only because a temporary office for the supervisor was set up there. In the Dominion Atlantic Railway history, Marguerite Woodworth suggests that Wolfville didn’t have land available to hold the station, roundhouse, machines shops, freight sheds and other sprawling facilities the railway required to operate.     

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