Tag Archives: acadia

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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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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