Tag Archives: artifacts

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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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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